There is more life in the eyes of a squirrel nailed to a plaque by a taxidermist than in the eyes of someone who has just waded through 800 words on the subject of chemistry, but something happened at Sunday Brunch today that caused me decide to write about the subject anyway.

The hotel manager handed me a bottle of wine from one of my competitors, with thousands of tiny floating crystals, and asked me what was wrong with it. I tried to explain that it was salt but she did not understand how there could be salt in an unopened bottle of wine. I further explained it was potassium bi-tartrate, the esterified form of tartaric acid, and that it indicates the wine was bottled without the winery chemist first ensuring the wine was chemically stable. By this point the familiar expression of the taxidermy squirrel was already in her eyes.

Maybe others don't find chemistry as beguiling as me but I am fascinated by it and admit to sometimes reading chemistry journals for pleasure. My interest stems from growing up around the wine industry and my respect for the intellect of former university professors.

In particular, I remember one professor of inorganic chemistry, a former assistant to the legendary chemist and physicist Linus Pauling, and something of a gourmet. He showed me how to use a vacuum still to make spaghetti sauce at low temperature and even how to cook a whole fish by the heat released when supersaturated-salt-water is instantly turned into solid salt by the addition of a seed crystal--with the fish swimming in the water!

This guy's brain operated at a level far beyond anyone I had ever encountered before. He believed that the molecular attraction of atoms known as hydrogen bonding is God. He was "out there", as we would say in California. But he was an inspiration, and he taught me how to find my way with numbers and chemical elements in winemaking, and in life.

In a winery, aside from working on the bottling line there probably is no task more mind numbingly boring, yet essential, than the work done in the chemical laboratory. It takes a certain kind of person to perform those rote, highly technical and repetitive tasks all day long, every day, for twenty years--without going crazy.

Like my old professor, laboratory technicians are more than a little bit strange. I remember this guy who was on Prozac and ate nothing but condensed soup--straight from the can, cold. But he was really good with flame atomic absorption analysis, so everyone pretended not to notice the whole soup thing.

The work laboratory technicians do is essential. From the time grapes begin to grow in the vineyard, the lab technician is assessing their sugar content; acidity; pH and amino acid composition. The winemaker relies upon their analyses to help decide when to harvest the grapes. Analytical chemists are responsible for quality control from the juice stage until the finished wine is shipped to market. They are charged with reducing spoilage and improving processing methods, assessing wine stability prior to shipping, maintaining accurate records, ensuring that blends are assembled correctly and certifying that wine complies with standards of export approval.

A wine's pH is the central measure of quality as pH determines the longevity of a wine, how much sulfite must be added and the wine's chemical stability after bottling. Fortunately for the technician, pH is the easiest component of wine to measure; you just dunk the pH meter's probe into the wine and read the measurement.

A more important analysis is the wine's alcohol percentage. The percentage of alcohol in wine directly contributes to its body and flavour but the real reason for measuring alcohol percentage has more to do with government's interest in taxation of the wine. Above 14%, and the wine is more heavily taxed. Below 7% or above 15%, it is not even considered to be wine.

The technician must also be a specialist in microbiology and will always be monitoring for the presence of spoilage bacteria in the wine and guiding the winemaker on the progress of fermentation. A good lab technician can distinguish between wild bacteria and cultured bacteria just by observing the organisms' morphology. They sometimes give nicknames to the organisms under their microscopes. No doubt fueled by Prozac, typical laboratory humour during the workday revolves around Petri dishes of mould spores and lunches being in close proximity in the refridgerator. Like I said, some of these folks are weird.

Back in the days when I first started to work with wine it was still not uncommon for small wineries to have no laboratory or even a pH metre. As vineyards began to replace walnut orchards and as the global wine industry became increasingly industrial, the laboratory technician began to take centre stage in the breakthrough of wine quality. For example, the relationship between a wine's pH and the amount of sulfite--needed to ensure stability of the wine--was not well understood until 1982. Before laboratory technicians and researchers made the connection between the two, a lot of winemaking was done by simply guesswork.

Some of the laboratory tests performed in winery laboratories are extremely exacting to perform and require great precision as the instruments used are so sensitive they can detect molecules at concentrations as low as in parts per billion. With other classes of chemicals, the human nose and sense of taste is more effective at detection than modern instruments so the laboratory technician is often called on to use their own body as an instrument, smelling and tasting potentially spoiled and other wine samples with off-odours for hours at a time. No wonder they need Prozac.

Chemistry and microbiology are like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. The laboratory technician is the one who has connected many of these pieces for the benefit of enhancing quality, and is the person winemakers depend on; to ensure all goodness nature put into the grape ends up in the bottle--and stays there until the wine reaches us in the marketplace. Some of them may eat cold condensed soup and see God in the periodic table, but without them, wine would not be what it is--and the goodness we expect and take for granted in commercial wine just would not be there.