The wines your great-grandchildren might one day drink on Mars will soon be coming to a bottle near you. Ava Winery is a San Francisco-based startup creating wines molecule by molecule, without the need for grapes or fermentation. With complete control over the chemical profile of the product, Ava’s wines can be created safely, sustainably, and affordably, joining the food technology revolution in creating the foods of the future.
For Ava, foods in the future will be scanned and printed as easily as photographs today. These digital recreations will be more than mere projections; they will be true chemical copies of the originals, capturing the same nutritional profiles, flavors, and textures of their “natural” counterparts. Our canvas will be macronutrients like starches and proteins; our pixels will be flavor molecules. Future generations won’t distinguish “natural” from “synthetic” because both will simply be considered food.
Consider ethyl hexanoate, although scary-sounding it is the very chemical that gives pineapples their characteristic smell and also fruity wines a tropical note. From pineapples, or indeed other organisms, ethyl hexanoate can be extracted much more efficiently. By sourcing more efficient producers of each of hundreds of different components, wines can be recreated as their originals.
Future generations won’t distinguish “natural” from “synthetic” because both will simply be considered food.
In fact, by eliminating the variability of natural systems as well as potential environmental contamination, this digitized future of food can increase the safety, consistency, and nutritional profile of foods. Such food products can reduce overall land and resource use and be less susceptible to climate fluctuations. Indeed this future will see significant reductions in the costs of food production as the cost of the raw ingredients shifts to more efficient sources of each molecule.
So why wine?
We knew there would be a controversial love/hate relationship with our mission to build wine molecule by molecule. To the elite who value the high-end wine experience, our molecularly identical creation of the $10,000+ bottle of 1973 Chateau Montelena will be a mockery; but to the public, the $10,000 turned $20 bottle will be a sensation. To the purists who still believe organic is the only way to eat or drink healthily, our wine will get “some knickers in knots”; but to the nonconformists, our wine will be a contemporary luxury made by contemporary technology.
In short, wine is just the beginning. Soon, Ava hopes to build more food products molecule by molecule further blurring these lines between natural vs. synthetic while simultaneously making luxury items available for all. With our groundwork, the Star Trek future of food might be closer than we thought.
James Kennedy 
Going to the store and buying a carton of “1973 Chateau MontelenaI” (whatever that is) seems as exciting to me as going to buy a carton of orange juice. Where’s the connection to the skill, labor, ~craftsmanship~ of the artisan, quality of the grape, soil, weather, etc.? Those very aspects of human skill and nature – the chance of getting it all wrong – that we take pleasure in and make “things” special? In my humble opinion, this Lab-wine has none of that, any of that, and, instead Ava’s creation offers nothing but the physical stimulus of taste. How boring, how sad.
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This is absolutely fantastic. I love what this winery is doing because I’m also trying to combat chemophobia with my soaps and other bath and body products. I make it clear that everything I make is 100% made of chemicals, and I try to show why chemicals aren’t inherently bad. I wish I had the ability to build my products molecule by molecule though. I look forward to trying this wine and other foods made this way.
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