Then she ran the wines past a trained panel of eighteen people. And sure enough, after some complicated statistics, not only did their reference words match to specific compounds in the wines, but Cabernets from different regions actually had different compositions to match. Heymann has done much the same thing for Malbec grapes from California, Washington, and Argentina—this time starting only with juice and making all the wine either at UC Davis or a site in Argentina, to minimize variations in the fermentation. “The regions had characteristics on their own,” she says.
