Latest Secondary fermentation Stories

Whether or not a wine turns out to be as outstanding as the winemaker hopes depends on the quality of the yeasts; they control the fermentation process and create the distinctive flavor. A new sensor allows winemakers to establish whether the grape must contains the right sort of microorganisms before fermentation has even begun. A good wine is unmistakable. It has its own particular taste, its own characteristic and singular aroma. None of this happens by accident: the production of...

The innermost secrets of champagne bubbles are about to be unveiled in the Springer journal EPJ ST. This fascinating work is the brainchild of Gérard Liger-Belair, a scientist tackling champagne bubbles from both a physics and a chemistry perspective. Based at the University of Reims, in the heart of the region that gave champagne its name, the author is appropriately affiliated with the 'effervescence team of the molecular and atmospheric spectrometry group' and the 'oenology and applied...

[ Watch the Video ] Just in time for those New Year's Eve toasts, which might include a farewell to the International Year of Chemistry, the world's largest scientific society today posted online a video on the chemistry of champagne. It explains that champagne, unlike other wines, undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle to trap carbon dioxide gas, which dissolves into the wine and forms the fabled bubbles in the bubbly. More than 600 different chemical compounds join carbon...

"I admit I never actually wrote this goal into my grant," UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry Richard Mathies told me, as one of his graduate students injected a drop of Zinfandel into Mathies's organic analyzer. "But it is an important demonstration" that the detector actually works.The device in Mathies's lab is a prototype of the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA). Along with several other components, MOA has been selected by NASA to be part of the Urey instrument that will fly aboard ESA's...