SCIENCE: Your Next Glass of Wine Might Be a Fake — And You’ll Love It.
The breakthrough started with baby food. In 2012, Hicks was about to become a father. He started wondering what, exactly, was in the organic, premium-priced products that he and his wife were planning to feed their newborn, so he sent samples off for laboratory analysis. “If you know Kevin,” Walker says, “you understand that that’s just totally something he would do.” When the bills—as much as $1,500 for a single sample—started to add up, Hicks created a lab of his own, which he dubbed Ellipse Analytics. He had a bigger plan. He invested several million dollars in equipment and hired a team of scientists and technicians and before long, Ellipse had enticed paying clients to commission chemical breakdowns of entire consumer categories, like protein powders and sunscreens. Walker saw the potential for wine, and he pushed Hicks to use his technology for their own business.
Like anything else, wine is a combination of chemicals. Ellipse can test for some 500 different attributes and measure the results at the parts-per-billion level. Hidden in that data, Walker realized, were the precise combinations of esters and acids and proteins and anthocyanins and other polyphenols that make a wine taste creamy or flinty, or give it aromas of blueberries or vanilla or old leather—the chemical compositions of America’s most popular wines. Walker also knew that most wine gets a boost from additives such as Mega Purple (for color), oak extract (for tannins and flavoring), and similar chemistry-set concoctions. Using cheap surplus wines readily available on the bulk market and blending in natural additives, he thought, it might be possible to make some pretty convincing copies of popular premium wines.
In 2015, Walker and Hicks started Integrated Beverage Group and set out to duplicate wines that they knew Americans already liked. They planned to do this in plain sight, naming their brand Replica and urging consumers to compare their products with well-known names that usually cost as much as double the price. It didn’t take long before they realized that, in most cases, even professional critics couldn’t distinguish their facsimiles from the originals.
Bring it on.