How Current and Future Climate and Environment Affect Grapes and Wine?
The quality and style of wine begins in the vineyard. Our research uses advanced analytical chemistry and traditional fermentation tools to trace how climate and vine physiology, including emerging stressors like wildfire smoke exposure, shape berry biochemistry and wine chemistry.
What Chemical Compounds Are Responsible for The Distinctive Wine Flavor?
Wine flavor arises from a set of molecules within a much larger nonvolatile matrix. Aroma compounds responsible for diverse and characteristic flavors in wine are foundation to understand and manange wine flavor. Our research focuses on identifying flavor-active metabolites in grapes and wine.
Aroma compounds, typically present at microgram- to nanogram-per-liter concentrations rather than the milligram-per-liter scale shown above, are disproportionate to mass, but such trace molecules can distinctively define how a wine is perceived.
Data adapted from Waterhouse, A. L., Sacks, G. L., & Jeffery, D. W. (2024). Understanding Wine Chemistry. Wiley.
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How Winemaking Operations and Aging Affect Wine Quality?
Grape sets the raw materials for winemaking, but specific production decisions greatly determine wine style and quality. Postharvest treatments, fermentation conditions, post-fermentation handling, and aging choices each reshape a wine's chemistry, and our research traces how these operations influence the final sensory and quality profile.
How Can Modern Analytical Chemistry Help Us Understand the Chemical Complexity of Grapes and Wine?
What does it take to understand wine's chemical complexity? Climate, fermentation, and aging all leave their mark on a wine's chemistry, and making sense of that complexity requires the right analytical tools. Our research pairs two complementary separation methods, gas chromatography and liquid chromatography, with mass spectrometry, then applies both targeted and nontargeted analysis to turn raw data into flavor chemistry insight.
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Separates volatile compounds, ideal for aroma-active molecules
Separates nonvolatile compounds like phenolics, carbonhydrates (sugars), proteins, and acids
Identifies and quantifies compounds by mass, structure, and abundance
Precise measurement of known and specific compounds
Broad, discovery oriented screening for unknown chemical features and compounds
Connecting chemical composition to the sensory attributes of wine
Dr. Liang Chen (中文：陈亮) is an assistant professor and wine analytical chemist at UC Davis. His research uses GC-MS/MS, LC-MS/MS, high-resolution mass spectrometry, and metabolomics to identify and quantify flavor compounds in wine. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide (now Adelaide University) with Prof. David Jeffery, then completed a postdoc at ISVV, University of Bordeaux with Prof. Philippe Darriet.
Develop diagnostic tools and discover new biomarkers for wildfire smoke exposure risk assessment.
Barrier sprays to mitigate smoke taints in grapes and wine
Flavor chemistry, analytical chemistry
L'Institut Agro Dijon, France
GC–MS/MS
- Terpenes
- Esters (ethyl and acetate esters)
- Higher alcohols
- Aldehydes and ketones
- Lactones
- Methoxypyrazines
- Volatile phenols
- Sulfur compounds
- Others
LC–MS/MS
- Glycosylated flavor precursors
- Varietal thiols
- Amino acids
- Organic acids
- Oxidation products
LC–HRMS (Orbitrap, Q-TOF)
- Unknown volatile and non-volatile metabolites
- Novel flavor compounds
- Degradation products
- Reaction intermediates
- Glycoconjugates
- Oxidation products
