For more than two years now — from the second floor of a repurposed warehouse in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco — the young scientists and chemists at Ava Winery have been attempting to save the planet and conduct commerce by producing wine without grapes or fermentation. Recently, the company rebranded and shifted its focus: now known as Endless West, it is attempting to make brown spirits without the hidebound utilization of barrels for maturation.

The pivot was accompanied by a new round of funding. The Ava website was taken down in early August, replaced by an Endless West website that says, “Coming Fall 2018.”

In Endless West’s 1,800-square-foot lab, there are no implements ordinarily associated with making wine or whiskey. Instead, one sees chemists quietly sitting at computers beside beakers, gas chromatography and mass spectrometer machines, and something called a liquid handling robot, which is loaded with test tubes that are filled with liquid from “real” wines and spirits. The white-smocked bio and analytical chemists are measuring and mapping the molecular profiles of standard alcoholic beverages. There is even a scanning area with an “electronic nose” to measure olfactory properties; something you likely won’t find in a standard winery lab.

The quest is to tease out which “naturally derived” carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, amino acids, and lipids comprise a wine or spirit, and which components encompass the organoleptic profiles of various alcoholic beverages. Key aromatics and flavor molecules are being identified such as citrus-like esters from ethyl isobutyrate and pineapple-y aromas derived from ethyl hexanoate or the buttery qualities found in the compound diacetyl.

Once recognized, neutral distillates or grain alcohol is then added to the recipe to synthetically formulate a wine or whiskey.

Endless West doesn’t yet sell any “products,” which is what co-founder and CEO Alec Lee calls its synthetic wine and spirits, and won’t until the end of this year at the absolute earliest. The planned first release is a brown spirit — a rum, bourbon, or whiskey. In another year or two, Lee says, the next product will be a wine. But he’s made big promises before — especially when it comes to wine.

In 2016, the company, then called Ava, had just closed a seed round in which it received $2.7 million led by Horizon Ventures of Hong Kong, according to an article in Business Insider.

At the time, Ava had promised to release 499 bottles modeled on a 1992 Dom Pérignon Champagne later that summer, “with plans to go to market in the next six to 12 months.” The sparkler has not yet been released.

Horizons, an investor in the 2016 funding round and the most recent one, also invested in Impossible Foods, the hamburger company that has produced plant-based meat that “bleeds.” The amount from the most recent round hasn’t been disclosed, and Endless West declined to say how much it was.

There are other, smaller investors who also think that Endless West can produce profitable imitation alcoholic beverages. One of these is IndieBio, the biotech brand of SOSV, a venture capital company. Managing director Arvind Gupta declined to say how much IndieBio invested in both rounds, but he did say it was in addition to the investment by Horizon.

“It was an easy decision,” Gupta said of the investment. “When they brought me the moscato, it made a lot of sense. We are investing in companies that are making products more efficiently. We have wildfires out of control so we need to invest in companies that can reduce the load on the environment. A huge amount of land, labor, and water is being used.”

But why make fake wine and whiskey at all, except as a novelty? Those associated with Endless West say its procedures uses less water and less land. Lee thinks that Endless West will ultimately either meet or surpass traditional wines and spirits with their offerings, using a method that’s more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. (This is also the pitch behind the Impossible Burger.)

“If things that we are doing were not necessary for the environment, we would not do it,” he says. “As a brand we are telling stories that no one has told before: there’s craft behind science; we’re not evil mad scientists behind the curtain.”

In fact, Endless West has a great deal of competition when it comes to unusual alcoholic beverages. There’s a Denver-based company that calls itself Replica Wine because its unabashed MO is to replicate higher-priced, high-profile wines using scientific techniques, purchased grapes, and blending regimens. Replica is trying to make its wines taste like the higher-priced thing, but at half the cost to the consumer.

There are at least six companies attempting to speed up the process of making spirits, and each uses different methods. Some traditional spirits are aged in their barrels for more than 20 years; these companies want the same results in far less time. Lost Spirits in Los Angeles has developed technologies that zap its products with high-intensity light and heat in a reactor.

Cleveland Whiskey in Ohio utilizes an aggressive, highly oxygenated, vacuumed, and pressurized environment to extract flavor from different strains of wood to produce its products rapidly. Terressentia in South Carolina and Kentucky uses a proprietary technique which can produce whiskey in barrels in only six months to a year. It uses ultrasonic energy or “transesterification” — the conversion of a carboxylic acid (fatty acid) ester into a different carboxylic acid ester (methanol) — which occurs in actual barrels over time, using natural heat and movement as an energy source.

Highspire Whiskey in Paso Robles, California uses wood chips it dumps into barrels to accelerate the process. Tuthilltown in upstate New York and Spirit Works in Sebastopol, California even blast music into filled barrels, wrapped with headphones, believing it quickens the process.

But back in the reawakened Dogpatch neighborhood in southern San Francisco, Endless West is the one firm that is trying to make alcoholic beverages far differently — by not using a grape, a barrel, or yeast to ferment its simulated products.

Surely this is interesting, but is it drinkable? The Verge participated in a blind tasting that included Endless West’s version of what the company calls a moscato d’Asti — a perhaps flip reference, since Asti is a growing region in Italy, and only grapes from that region can be said to be d’Asti. It was Endless West’s first and presumably only finished product at the time of this writing. Surprisingly, no spirits were offered that day, even though Lee had previously said they would be available.

Two moscatos stood out from the rest, which were mostly innocuous moscatos from various regions of Europe. One tasted and smelled like an ashtray. The other simply didn’t taste like grapes. The ashray moscato was in fact a canned wine made from grapes. The other was Endless West’s.

Endless West’s moscato had a plastic aroma and taste, and reeked with artificiality. There wasn’t much in the way of fruit, nor was there a hint of acidity, which would have brightened the flavors and balanced the wine. The basic components that always make up the profile of a wine were nonexistent, and the whole flavor was masked by inauthenticity.

Lee has something of a philosophical treatise on authenticity. “Authenticity does not require a grape,” he says, as though he’d addressed the subject a hundred times. “Our product is just as authentic as any other product on the market. For every action a winemaker takes, there’s a corresponding action that we take.”

Lee likens EW’s project to digitizing a faded photograph. A digital upload of an old photograph isn’t identical to the original, in Lee’s view, but that doesn’t lessen its ability to take a person gazing upon it back in time.

“What people miss — this is a different expression,” Lee says. “It looks different from what people are used to as to what is authentic. The concept of natural is an evolving concept.”

IndieBio’s Gupta shares Lee’s view. “If you believe wine is a process — terroir, the story of the making of the wine — and if that’s important to you,” then Endless West’s project might be confusing, he says. But if wine is simply a delightful beverage made for drinking, then the process matters much less.

The tasting, in some ways, made Gupta’s point clear: the ashtray moscato was indeed authentic. It was not, however, good. But when my editor and I tasted the wines, we both immediately identified the two “wrong” wines as that one and Endless West’s grapeless offering.

Immediately after the tasting, Lee says he is “unfazed” with our assessment. “I was thinking about the tasting and how I felt about it,” Lee says in a phone call eight days later. “I don’t think the results of that tasting are binary. It’s not a pass / fail.”

I told Gupta how I’d felt about Endless West’s wine and he, too, was undeterred. “To do really big things, you’ve got to try; it’s easy to say ‘nothing will work’ or ‘nothing is perfect,’” he says. “Through trial and error you can get it right and change the world.”

As for the grain-alcohol product Endless West plans to make: does it count as whiskey? Eric Simanek, head of the organic and biological chemistry department at Texas Christian University, is skeptical of EW’s endeavors, but intrigued nonetheless.

“I think the laws of nature suggest that it’s possible to reconstruct any known mixture,” says Simanek, who is the co-author of Shots of Knowledge: The Science of Whiskey. What’s difficult is replicating whiskey — in part because we don’t really know how the chemical parts of whiskey interact with our senses of smell and taste. “Does a sum of most of the parts constitute the whole? The verdict is still out on that one especially when it comes to whiskey.”

Sure, but would he drink the “whiskey” Endless West is making? “As a scientist, I think I’m compelled to,” Simanek says. “As a whiskey lover, even more so.”

Simanek is partial to the single-malt Scotch Laphroaig. But he notes something else that’s important about drinking: the environment where one drinks matters. So should he taste-test Endless West’s projected product, “I would enjoy finding the right environment to enjoy this synthetic concoction with good friends who have strong opinions.”

One person who does not believe Endless West can produce synthetic wine and make it taste like grape-based, fermented wine is Clark Smith. He is the wine industry’s go-to guy for taming tannins and reducing alcohol, all from his huge old Mary Shelley-like manufactory in Sonoma County, California.

Endless West’s project to create wine and spirits from chemistry relies on a faulty assumption, Smith says. Wine is more than an ideal chemical solution, with a function derived from its chemistry alone, says Smith, the author of Postmodern Winemaking: Rethinking the Modern Science of an Ancient Craft.

“The sensory properties of a lump of coal, a graphite tennis racket, and a diamond are in no way direct artifacts of their chemical composition, which is 100 percent carbon in each case,” Smith says. “The key is the molecular structure — the way the atoms relate to each other. Great wine is about architecture, not composition.”

“You can’t judge the architecture of a building by counting the bricks,” Smith says. And in his view, that’s exactly what Endless West is trying to do. “They don’t have a clue how wine works.”

At least one entity agrees with Smith: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which regulates wines. Currently, Endless West’s wines don’t meet the definition of wine, according to the ATF, Lee says. Ava Winery hadn’t looked into these regulations before it started to make wine, which has caused Endless West to change course.

“We pivoted away before we dug into that matter,” he says. Endless West has registered as a distilled spirits company.

The pivot to spirits from wine is a pragmatic one because the regulation is easier to deal with, according to Lee.

“In this case it might be an easier path,” says Rachel Dumas Rey, founder of Compli, an alcohol beverage compliance company based in Paso Robles, California. “If they’re not starting with fruit or agricultural products, it’s difficult to classify that as wine.” Endless West’s spirits may have an easier route because the company isn’t producing distilled spirits — just modifying them. Though, she warns, “there may be a loophole that we’re not aware of.”  

So, is there a market for synthetic whiskey? Dashiell Mann of the Whiskey Shop in Brooklyn, which specializes in small batch spirits, says, “It sounds interesting. I’d definitely like to try it but I think a serious whiskey-head would be dubious.”

If Endless West’s product tasted good and the price was right, Mann says he’d carry it. There’s a catch, though: “It would have to be better than the equivalent whiskey at the same price.”

Christopher Donovan, of The House of Glunz in Chicago, agrees. He thinks the environmentalism is a marketing gimmick. The real question is if Endless West can make something great and at a lower price point.

Would his shop carry Endless West?

“If it tastes good, we don’t discriminate about something that doesn’t have the cachet of age,” he responds. “We’d open on a Saturday and let people taste it.”

So then the question of whether there’s a market for fake wines and spirits may revolve less around authenticity and more about taste, which might come as a relief to Endless West’s CEO. But Lee and his 14 employees are still saddled with a formidable task: making good booze in a new way, and making it good enough to satisfy critics.  

“The beauty in the thing that keeps me optimistic is that this is a technology that is rapidly progressing,” Lee says. “Two years ago we were nowhere.” Fortunately, we still have Laphroaig — which, itself, makes a good case for traditionally made alcoholic beverages.

It isn’t obvious, standing by the stainless steel tanks where wines are supposed to ferment, that Tom Eddy’s winery was at the epicenter of the Tubbs Fire, which last year burned about 20 miles from north of Calistoga in Napa Valley to Santa Rosa. In fact, on October 8th last year, the winery was at the heart of the conflagration. But even though the charred meadow below has recovered, and the tanks appear unharmed, there was a casualty: the wine. The juice the tanks held had been tainted by smoke.

Eddy lost 80 percent of his 2017 wine, representing what he says was a $2.5 million loss. “The only reason I can still function is that I don’t have that much work to do,” the 66-year-old winemaker wryly tells me. Now, left without a harvest, Eddy walks me into his cave, in which oak barrels sit, each holding the previous three vintages.

He pulls his 2015 cabernet sauvignon, which was trapped in barrels during the fire and bottled five months later. The wine, called Elodian, will be released next year at $60 a bottle. Eddy insists that I’ll find no fire smoke in the aroma or flavor.

When I taste the wine later, I do so slowly over the course of hours, to see if the smoke taint shows. The only suggestion of smoke came at the top of the palate, apparently from the barrels in which the wine sat for 17 months. (Coopers char barrels over open flames during the construction process.)

It’s possible most consumers will have no clue that Eddy’s wine had come from a source that was inundated with smoke from the fire. That’s precisely what the wine industry wants.

When the record-breaking fires swept California last year, there were only a few grapes left out — 90 percent had been harvested already. The wine industry is anxious to tell you that the wine was mostly unaffected. I talked to more than a dozen sources for this article, and all of them were afraid that the ‘17 vintage would be forever tainted as the Fire-Damaged Year.

But fires are more frequent than they used to be, which is why wineries are trying to identify what the industry calls smoke taint — a specific flavor profile that comes from fire exposure — and remove it, as quickly as they  can.

Wildfires have always threatened world wine regions. In Australia, Chile, Portugal, Spain, Washington state, and California, fires have for decades damaged wine, resulting in billions of dollars lost. But the fires are only getting more frequent and more serious as climate change warms and dries certain wine-growing regions.

It matters when in the year fires happen, too. For instance, in the summer of 2008, California experienced wildfires for weeks. The timing meant that the fire’s detritus was absorbed by the vines, before budbreak; and will therefore carry molecules into the skins. When the fruit actually begins to appear, smoke penetrates the skins of the grapes, compromising the juice. In 2017, the fires occurred over a shorter period of time, and later in the season when most of the grapes were picked; whatever accumulation of smoke there was, entered through the grapes. More drought means more fire and less certainty about when in the growing season it will be.

Even the places where wines can be grown have begun to shift. For instance, wine grapes are being grown in England and Sweden — two areas that heretofore, have not planted vinifera (grapes specially cultivated for making wine). Grapes that are currently being grown in known wine regions might have to be planted elsewhere due to climate change. More heat — and more drought — during the growing season poses a challenge to winemakers, says David Graves of Saintsbury winery in Napa Valley.

Cool climate varieties such as chardonnay and Pinot Noir, the grapes that make French Champagne, are also being harvested in southern England as a hedge against climate change. The Champagne region may become too warm to grow top-quality grapes, according reporting from The Atlantic and Vinepair.

The rising summertime temperatures will make business as usual impossible for wine regions, Graves says. “Some of my colleagues think they can change a few management practices but otherwise pretty much stay with business as usual,” he tells me. “I don’t think that is a wise strategy.”

Compounding the problem, New World wines generally use a narrow selection of wine grapes. So examining genetic diversity of those grapes might reveal varieties that could adapt to the future climate, Graves says. He predicts that Napa will grow a broader mix of grape varieties in the future — but figuring out how to fully deal with fire could take decades. After all, fire doesn’t just pose a risk to the wine — it threatens the people who grow it, and the places where they live.

Graves isn’t alone in sounding the alarm. When Harry Peterson-Nedry, an Oregon winemaker who owns Ribbon Ridge Winery, started growing grapes in 1980, the region was ideal for cool weather grapes like Pinot Noir and riesling. Now his winery is almost warm enough for cabernet sauvignon.

Nedry, who is a chemist as well as a winemaker, has been tracking climate records for decades. Temperatures in the Willamette Valley’s McMinnville, the commercial center for that wine region, were 17 percent higher during the growing seasons of 1997 to 2007 than they were from 1961 to 1990. “It seems to really have ramped up in the last five years,” he told McClatchy DC last year. “If we see this for another five years, we will really be questioning what is going on.”

A decade ago, Greg Jones, the director of wine education at Linfield College in McMinnville, was already talking about the dangers of climate change. He predicted then that we’re going to experience warmer and longer growing seasons, longer dormant periods and altered ripening profiles. Then, he said that he was no longer on the fence about climate change — the climate in wine-growing regions would be different in the future.

“Climates have changed actually more rapidly than anticipated,” he says now. The climate is both more variable and warmer — bad news for specialty crops like wine grapes that are very sensitive to the weather.

Not only is it getting warmer in Oregon, there’s more temperature variation, Jones says. “Grape growers can anticipate that to some degree; and perhaps they can adapt to it,” he says. But if drought, heavy rainfall, or frost start to be less predictable, it will be even harder for growers to adapt.

What’s a winemaker to do? Does it make sense to create a bigger canopy to shelter the fruit, or plant on a different, cooler slope? As it happens, there are some models.

Some growers in southern Sweden, parts of Canada, and Michigan are planting wine grapes that can cope with variable temperatures, and that resist smoke, Jones says. In Oregon, California, and Washington, for instance, less than a century ago, the climate was “marginal” for grape production, Jones says. In those days, because of climate difference, only two or three vintages were considered good. The climate now is becoming more suitable for Pinot Noir, pinot gris, and Müller-Thurgau grapes in places such as Washington’s Puget Sound. “That region is in the same place the Willamette Valley was in the ‘70 and ‘80s,” Jones says.

But wine growers aren’t the only ones on the problem. Scientists in Australia and in the US are frantically analyzing grapes to determine if certain varieties can be grown elsewhere, in places that are less susceptible to wildfires. They’re also looking for grapes that are less likely to be ruined by smoke, and to sort out what to do with grapes that have been exposed to fire, leading to what those in the industry call smoke taint.

Wine has always been chemically sophisticated, a point illustrated by a   170-year-old bottle of Champagne discovered in a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. The find, reported in a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how much can occur in sealed 750-mL microlaboratories. When modern scientists analyzed the bottles, the results revealed “unexpected chemical characteristics in terms of small ion, sugar, and acid contents as well as markers of barrel aging.”

The earliest winemakers didn’t have our sophisticated knowledge of the microbes that drive fermentation, though. It wasn’t until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed cells in 1680 that “modern” chemistry took hold. But even before we knew exactly how it happened, yeast and fermentation have been the cornerstones of winemaking for millennia.

The chemistry of smoke taint was kickstarted in 2008, after a series of near-annual Australian bushfires began proliferating, destroying vineyards, and causing smoke tainted grapes. That fire damage was the catalyst that prompted the Australian wine industry to begin extensive testing. At first, scientists had identified only one compound that contributed to smoke taint: guaiacol, which affects taste and color. Now, at least four others that contribute to the burnt odors in wine have been identified. But only recently have scientists begun to realize those molecules may not predict whether the grapes will make smoky wines.

So nervous Californian winemakers — worried about the possibility of smoke taint — can now take samples to the American wine industry’s most important lab, ETS Laboratories. The unremarkable two-story office building in Napa Valley’s St. Helena, is devoted exclusively to analyzing grapes. When I visit, cars pull up and people emerge carrying small boxes filled with test-tube samples of wine.

Inside, Gordon Burns and his crew of about 25 scientists and technicians hunch over their instruments. At first, Burns is reluctant to speak about the fires — too much has been written about it, he says, and he doesn’t want to hurt the industry by associating all 2017 wine with fire. Three media outlets had called him just that day.   

For the last seven months, most of ETS’s work has been telling panicky clients whether their specimens show the telltale signs of smoke taint. There are at least a half-dozen compounds that stick to sugars, and their presence indicates smoke-tainted aromas and flavors.

Burns’ lab uses more than a half-dozen gas chromatography and mass spectrometry machines to detect trace amounts of identifiable compounds that might indicate fire-smoke markers. ETS claims it can measure compounds to one part per billion. The lab was running 24 hours a day after last year’s California fires. In the two or three days after the fire, there was no power at the lab,  forcing ETS to use its generators; it was possible that smoke might have infiltrated his equipment. After testing, ETS determined little or no smoke was detected in the instruments — and so the lab got to work.

Burns’ lab isn’t trying to figure out whether the wines will smell or taste different, he tells me repeatedly. Instead, the goal of ETS is to show which varieties of wine are most susceptible to smoke taint.

But what to do with the grapes that have already been tainted by smoke? Vintners have a few choices: discard them or sell them on the bulk market, where likely they’ll be blended into other wine.  

It may be possible to remove some of the offending flavors of smoke taint, according to Bob Kreisher, president of Mavrik North America (MNA) wine processing in Santa Rosa, California. His company filters wine, using a membrane (the type is proprietary) to separate the known smoky compounds from the rest of the wine — which, ideally, spares the aromas and flavor of the wine in question. “Fortunately, nobody has determined that they have to get rid of a single lot we’ve treated,” he says.

Commercial labs are not the only entities working to understand — and, ideally,  mitigate — smoke taint. Universities such as UC Davis, Washington State, and Oregon State are working together on the problem, too.

For instance, there’s Davis’ Anita Oberholster, whose focus is developing analytical methods to diagnose smoke taint. She’s gotten grapes from growers that were affected by last year’s fires. “The main reason why they offered me the grapes is they were not going to pick them otherwise,” she says. “All my grapes come from vineyards that were pretty close to the fires and had several days of heavy fresh smoke exposure.” Oberholster’s team has tasted all the wines from those grapes, and though the degree of smokiness varies, all of them were affected.

Most solutions for removing smoke taint rely on one form or another of filtration. Some ways to reduce smoke taint rely on enzymes to remove fire-related solids from the wine. Another technique involves passing wine through a tight filter, removing the compounds known to cause smoke taint by dissolving and removing them. A third method, the process which MNA and others use, involves certain kinds of membranes — but because that technology is proprietary, labs tend to be secretive about how it’s done. With any of these methods, there’s a risk that natural aromas and flavors could be removed with the smoke taint, though.

As the climate changes, extreme weather events will happen more often. Joe Cafaro, a winemaker and grower in the eastern hills of Napa Valley, lost half his vineyard in October’s fires. “This is our new normal,” he says.

When all else fails, there’s always marketing. Take, for instance, France’s solution: a yeast called Brettanomyces, which is found in dirty cellars, sometimes remains in the Burgundy region’s wine, causing a distinctly barnyard aroma. But through creative marketing, the region has associated that aroma with high-quality wines. And now, Burgundy lovers insist they love the earthy aroma in their Pinot Noirs. With a little creative force, smoke could become a positive for certain wine regions — reinforcing the wine’s authenticity.

Another option is cutesy brand names. When the now-defunct Carmenet Winery’s vineyards in Sonoma County were damaged by a fire in 1997, the winemaker debuted Dynamite Red and a white it called Burning Leaf. Those brands, created by wine industry veteran Michael Richmond, sold a lot of wine; 8–10,000 cases per year, which eclipsed sales of the parent brand. Or after the New Zealand Boxing Day fire of 2000, the Fire Road brand was created by folks who fought the blaze in Fireroad.

Once, Tom Eddy, the winemaker from Calistoga, set a wine barrel on fire, quickly put it out, poured wine into it, and tightly sealed the bung – just to see how the wine would fare. It was as smoky as one can imagine. He raised the price $20.

This year, he can’t do much — the tanks that overlook the meadow where the fire raged are empty, and most of his 2017 crop was wiped out. But the scale of the fires means that the market may soon be clogged with newly named, smokier wine. And that means he won’t be able to add a $20 surcharge for smoke.