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| Bordeaux Wine Snobs Have a Point, According to This Computer Model | Bordeaux Wine Snobs Have a Point, According to This Computer Model |
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| In the Bordeaux region of southwest France, scores of vineyard estates transform finicky grapes into bold blends of red wine. Some bottles sell for thousands of dollars each. Prestigious chateaus boast about the soil, microclimate and traditional methods that make their own wine superior, an inscrutable mix known as terroir. | In the Bordeaux region of southwest France, scores of vineyard estates transform finicky grapes into bold blends of red wine. Some bottles sell for thousands of dollars each. Prestigious chateaus boast about the soil, microclimate and traditional methods that make their own wine superior, an inscrutable mix known as terroir. |
| “It’s one of those terms that the wine industry likes to keep a bit mysterious, part of the magic of wine,” said Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Geneva. | “It’s one of those terms that the wine industry likes to keep a bit mysterious, part of the magic of wine,” said Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Geneva. |
| Dr. Pouget is trying to apply chemical precision to this je ne sais quoi. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Communications Chemistry, he and his colleagues described a computer model that could pinpoint which Bordeaux estate produced a wine based only on its chemical makeup. The model also predicted the year in which the wine was made, known as its vintage, with about 50 percent accuracy. | Dr. Pouget is trying to apply chemical precision to this je ne sais quoi. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Communications Chemistry, he and his colleagues described a computer model that could pinpoint which Bordeaux estate produced a wine based only on its chemical makeup. The model also predicted the year in which the wine was made, known as its vintage, with about 50 percent accuracy. |
| Although wine connoisseurs often claim to be able to distinguish among wines from top estates, they rarely do blind taste tests, he said. “People have made those claims for decades, but we’ve never actually had an objective measurement that showed that this was true,” he said. | Although wine connoisseurs often claim to be able to distinguish among wines from top estates, they rarely do blind taste tests, he said. “People have made those claims for decades, but we’ve never actually had an objective measurement that showed that this was true,” he said. |
| Dr. Pouget grew up in Paris in a family that drank only Bordeaux (“You pretend Burgundy does not exist,” he said). As a young neuroscientist in the late 1980s, he studied the brain with machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that identifies patterns in large data sets. He believed that these methods could be useful for the wine industry, but didn’t get around to testing the idea for 30 years. | |
| He teamed up with Stéphanie Marchand from the Institute of Vine and Wine Science in Bordeaux, who had created a database of 80 wines of various vintages from seven chateaus. The database held the chemical signatures of each wine gleaned from gas chromatography, an old and inexpensive method for breaking substances down into their molecular components. |