(Indaily) - Why not try to replicate Australia's cheap, environmentally-unfriendly plonk in a laboratory? Wine writer Philip White rounds off his short series on poison, wine and groundwater.

The derision had dribbled to a drip: the naysayers had all wandered off somewhere else when Daily Wine News, a local Adelaide index, reported that San Francisco’s Ava Winery, which turns out to be a lab more than a virtual winery, was hacking wine.

Like making it from things we call chemicals rather than growing it. Faster, cheaper, safer, they claim.

My allocation of said derision had come in response to my suggestion a couple of weeks back that perhaps one solution to the environmental, social and economic damage wine grape irrigators cause in the Murray-Darling Basin could lie in making an equivalent intoxication from other stuff somewhere else.