CONNOISSEURS can now amaze their fellow wine lovers by deducing the very forest that nurtured the wood that built the barrel in which a particular vintage was aged. All they need is a mass spectrometer.
Each forest has its own climate, its own soil characteristics and its own telltale mixture of tree parasites and lichens. So chemicals that seep into wine from wooden barrels should vary depending on where the timber grew.
That’s just what a team of wine chemists found when they used mass spectrometry to analyse French wines. Led by of the University of…
