Plonk drinkers will be happy with this news: According to The Daily Mail, “scientists claim they have discovered the key to making hangover-free wine, by altering the DNA of yeast in the drink”. Professor Yong-Su Jin and his team at Illinois University have been working hard at this and we can applaud them for this discovery.

This is our suggestion for hangover-free wine: drink the quality stuff. This is why we don’t drink out of papsaks in the 2ov office. It’s Pierre Jourdan or bust for us. Achim von Arnim has done heaps and bounds for South African bubbly, which we can now proudly call Méthode Cap Classique.

If you’re drinking MCC, then you’re drinking sparkling wine done the French way (they call it Champagne over there). Instead of shoving in a bit of carbon dioxide, the MCC or Champagne bubbles are created through “a traditional method of combining sugar and yeast to incite a secondary fermentation in the bottled wine”. Thus, sparkling wine can be distinguished from MCC as it has carbon dioxide added to it which is a much quicker method. And, in a lot of cases, quicker equals cheaper.

Here’s the question then: do you want to be drinking quality or quantity? When it comes to wine and bubbly, it’s quality all the way for us.

As far as science goes, though, this is what they have discovered:

Professor Jin used the enzyme nuclease as a ‘genome knife’ to snip DNA and precisely modify yeast strains used in fermentation. They found that winemakers can clone the enzyme to enhance malolactic fermentation – a secondary process that makes wine smooth. Improper malolactic fermentation generates the toxic byproducts thought to cause hangover symptoms.

So, until winemakers start modifying yeast, we will stick to the good stuff.

[Source: IOL and Wine SA]