(TechCrunch) - You’ve heard of turning water into wine, but Alec Lee and his founding team of bioengineers have taken to their San Francisco laboratory to turn molecules into wine. “We create the wine without any grapes, yeast or any kind of fermentation,” Lee, the founder of Ava Winery, told TechCrunch. Ava does this by analyzing molecular profiles of select wines and reconstructing them as a bioidentical match to more expensive wines, like an $11,000 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, which essentially put New World wines on the map for the industry. AVA in the wine industry stands for “American Viticultural Area,” and the startup’s name plays on it as a wine made in an American lab. The claim to make wine from a group of bonded atoms sounds a bit like alchemy, but Lee swears his products are the real deal. “It’s essentially just a big chemistry problem,” he told me before getting ready for his presentation today at IndieBio SF’s Demo Day. “We don’t need alchemy to change one kind of molecule to another. You can deconstruct water and replicate it in the lab, for instance.” Right now the startup is focused on replicating three wine clones — a Moscato d’Asti, a Dom Perignon and they just started work on a Pinot noir. But quantifying right out of the bottle is tough to do. Lee told me the biggest challenge is figuring out the concentrations of the different molecules. Each wine has between 80 to 200 compounds with both synergistic and anti-synergistic effects all in play to make it taste, feel and look the way it does. “The goal is to get to a point where you just need a glass worth to identify the molecules,” Lee said.