Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee came up with the idea while visiting a winery in California`s Napa Valley in 2015. There, they were shown the bottle of an iconic wine, Chateau Montelena, which is famous for being the first Californian chardonnay to beat French contenders at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976.

`I was transfixed by this bottle displayed on the wall,` says Chua.
`I could never afford a bottle like this, I could never enjoy it. That got me thinking.`

Traditionally, wine is made by fermenting grapes – yeast turns sugars in the grape juice into ethanol. The process also develops many hundreds of flavour compounds, but takes time and produces variable results. Could there be a simpler way?

Within days, Chua had begun tinkering, combining ethanol with fruity flavour compounds like ethyl hexanoate, which has a fruity, pineapple-like aroma. The initial concoction was monstrous, he says. But six months later, Chua and Lee now think they have produced an experimental synthetic wine that mimics the taste of the sparkling Italian white wine Moscato d’Asti (see our tasting notes below), and are now turning their hands to producing an imitation Dom Pérignon champagne.

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