This is

this is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

When it comes to wine, the concept of Teruar

is sort of a nebulous thing.

Teruar is sometimes translated as the wine's character.

Here's how my friend Valerie, a wine importer, explained it.

I would say Terwar is a specific set of natural elements that all come together in harmony to produce a very specific

outcome with say the soil and the exposure to the sun, the drainage, the proximity to water, the fog,

all of these things, they all come together in an expression that we find beautifully in the grape.

Some of those factors might be hard to measure,

but here's a new one that might contribute a quantifiable essence to Terriwaar,

the grapes microbiome.

It certainly could be that the house microbiome influences the wines in overt or subtle ways

that we just don't understand yet.

David Mills, a microbiologist at UC Davis.

Mills worked with the Farniente and Nickel-nickel wineries in California's Napa Valley.

The winemakers there took five samples of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon fermentations as the juice transformed to wine.

Then Mills and his colleagues ran microbial and chemical tests on those time-dependent samples.

They found that the bacterial and fungal species on the grapes corresponded to a certain chemical fingerprint, a mix of metabolites in the finished wines.

And we also were able to use this to predict and make a model where we might be able to predict the kind of metabolites that show up in a wine.

They did no sensory tests in this study, no smelling or tasting, but along with past research, the findings suggest that microbes do affect the wines terwar.

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