This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The fires that ripped across NAP in Sonoma last year damaged some two dozen wineries and burned others completely to the ground.

Yeah and also don't forget chili burned pretty good this year too.

In fact, the fires there destroyed quite a few old vineyards.

West Sandburg, an analytical chemist at the University of British Columbia

at the Okanagan campus, right in BC's wine country.

Basically, this is a problem in North and South America this year.

Even wineries that are unscathed by fire may suffer from smoke passing through the vineyards

because it can leave that year's vintage with unpleasant smoky notes.

Zandberg and his team studied that process with an experimental plot of Cabernet Franc vines,

five of which they exposed to wood smoke and five they left alone.

What they found was when volatile compounds and smoke land on the grapes, the fruit very quickly

sucks the chemical into its skin or flesh, and then it tags sugar molecules onto the smoky compounds, which renders

the smoky substances water-soluble and non-toxic. But that chemical conversion leaves the compounds

with no scent or taste,

which means winemakers can't detect them in grapes, until it's too late.

When you take a bunch of grape juice and expose it to yeast during the fermentation process.

The yeast have the required enzymes to cleave that sugar from the smoke-flavored compounds.

And so it kind of it kind of unmasked them during fermentation

making them once again detectable by nose and tongue the findings are in the journal

of agricultural and Food Chemistry.

This study was funded in part by a local chemical testing company,

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