Researchers at the intellectual nerve-centre of the American wine industry, UC Davis, and the University of Adelaide, Australia, has located the gene responsible for producing tartaric acid from vitamin-C in wine grapes. Tartaric acid exerts the most important influence on a wine's taste and feel in the mouth, its colour and its longevity in the bottle. Scientists have compared the gene has been compared with an aeroplane's black box because of the important secret it contains.

This was reported by www.azcentral.com quoting a paper, which has significant commercial ramifications, published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Experts believe the same discovery can be used to produce vitamin-C enriched table grapes by engineering the gene to block tartaric acid production.

Getting a better handle on how grapes make tartaric acid will help vintners make a crisper sauvignon blanc or avoid producing a soapy Semillon, said Doug Cook, a plant biologist at UC Davis whose pioneering work on the grape genome provided the foundation for the discovery. It could also save winemakers a lot of money. In Australia, for instance, growers spend millions of dollars every year buying tartaric acid to give balance to flabby wines. The practice is common in India as well.