Australian Wine Research Institute

Yesterday, I flew down to Adelaide for the day and visited our collaborators at the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI). AWRI are our partners in the Australian node of the Yeast 2.0 synthetic biology project. While I was down there I gave a seminar and we had fun discussions over the progress of our collaborative project. The photos below show a couple of interesting scenes from labs at AWRI. Of course, a trip to AWRI wouldn't be complete without some wine consumption, so we ended the visit with a wine and cheese tasting.

It was a bit jarring to walk through labs and see wine bottles sitting around on lab benches

This was cool though- this is a GC-MS for detecting different metabolites in wine, on the very right hand side is a sniffer where you stick your nose, so you correlate specific wine aromas with the detected chemicals. One of the latest discoveries from AWRI is identifying the chemical that gives a peppery smell to wine, which turns out to be the same compound that gives a peppery smell to pepper!