Wine goes back to biblical times, but today’s wineries are digging into the chemical properties and hi-tech tools of the future to transform their wine into precisely calculated products.

Hundreds of wineries large and small across the Tri-Counties have been turning to two regional wine lab companies, Baker Wine & Grape Analysis and Vinquiry, to make production flaws ancient history.

Want to know just how sweet those Grenache grapes are? Think that Champagne is a little too cloudy? How about dropping in some nanoproteins to round off the mouth-feel of the wine?

Welcome to the winemaking industry of today, where winemakers no longer get butterflies before tasting the first sip from the first bottle of the season. They know the chemical properties and balance of the wine, often at every stage of the production process.

As the harvest gets under way, the wine labs have been especially busy.
“Right now the most common thing is the pre-harvest pack. I’m doing that right and left,” said Brenda Baker, owner of Baker Wine & Grape Analysis in Paso Robles, which has just two employees.