Where art meets science - in the barrel

I started photographing wine through the microscope first, for its beauty. When I was artist-in-residence for Sterling Vineyards, the winemakers asked questions that they wanted to have illustrated by microscopic expressions.  Did a wine fined with egg white look different than one fined with clay, what about wine made from mountain grapes compared to  valley floor.  And so they opened me to discovering about the science of winegrowing through microscopic art forms.

Over the years I learned more about wine making, even interned for harvest, the result - my first book Wine's Hidden Beauty out two weeks ago.  So at this blog I will occasionally extract content to share with you.  This is from Chapter 2 entitled TRANSFORMATION.

The Dance of Transformation


Through grape’s partnership with yeast, the alchemical transformation of fermentation begins. Yeast loves sugar in the sweet grape juice, chews it up and converts it into bubbly carbon dioxide and spirited alcohol.

Juice becomes wine


In wine’s creation story, yeast adds something essential to the mix of sweet juice, acids, tannins, and pigments. They not only transform sugar into other molecules and alcohol, they bring more light to the microscopic display.

I interpret the light as reflecting spirit and vitality, though technically it’s a lot more. 

A glimpse into fermenting chardonnay.

The tiny particles are yeast, the rest is probably tartrates. I have embedded onto the picture hieroglyphs from ancient wine barrel as I often see the invisible forms in wine as glyphs, symbols on the wine’s expression.