Interesting article about wine chemistry professor Andrew Waterhouse:
“As soon as I heard I got the job, I started reading,” he remembers. “Professionally, I knew nothing. I was a wine lover, but I had no idea what was in wine, really, other than alcohol.” Now he studies wine’s complex natural products, such as flavonoids. “Winemakers call it chicken wire chemistry,” he says, because the hexagons in the flavonoid structures resemble chicken wire to those untrained in chemistry.
Waterhouse says when he first started at UC Davis he tried to teach organic chemistry to budding winemakers the same way he taught it to premeds. “It didn’t work,” he says. For example, when he taught his students about terpenes—important flavor compounds in certain wines such as Rieslings—he discussed how the compounds undergo acid-catalyzed rearrangement during aging.
“I was showing the students allylic cations forming, rearranging, and eliminating. And it was completely useless to them,” he says. “They have to understand something about terpene chemistry, but they don’t have to understand mechanistic transformations from one terpene to another.” This made Waterhouse completely rethink how he taught chemistry to these students. He needed to talk about chemistry that would be useful in wine making. “That’s why they take classes—they want to understand what’s happening so they can manage it better. It’s a very applied use of chemistry.”
Read the full article here:
Considering buying his book. Here’s a peek: