The realization that everything is made up of molecules, and their arrangement is what distinguishes fine wines from low quality wines, led a San Francisco biotech engineer to speculate that he could make wine and champagne in the lab that tasted the same as the expensive stuff. But the team's work was complicated by complaints from a representative from the company that owns Dom Périgno as well as regulations on just what could be called wine.
They moved on to whiskey and set out to make a product that tasted as good as or better than Pappy Van Winkle’s 20-Year-Old Family Reserve. Turns out it wasn't that hard. They isolated the flavors of whiskey and found chemicals that replicated those flavors. Add them to ethanol, and that's their whiskey called "Glyph," made in the lab by their company, Endless West.
Read all about it in An Exclusive First Taste of Lab-Made Whiskey.
Hmm, lab made whiskey would probably go well with lab grown steak.
Meanwhile, the brand name whiskey makers aren't too proud to flavorize their own products, e.g., Crown Royal Texas Mesquite:
Crown Royal Texas Mesquite is a blend of Crown Royal Deluxe infused with the smoky soul of locally sourced Texas mesquite wood. The result is a unique flavor that is smoky and spicy with the distinctive smoothness of Crown Royal.
"Smoky soul of locally sourced Texas mesquite wood." Now there's a colorful euphemism some ad man came up with for chemical flavor.
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3:12 PM 12/30/2018
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