Vice featured Alec Lee and Mardonn Chua, the UBC alumni behind a winery startup called Ava Winery that makes wine without grapes.
Lee and Chu met in UBC’s biotechnology program and now work replicating wines using raw chemical compounds.
“I don’t care about ruffling feathers,” Lee said. “If we can make a product exactly like [an expensive wine], with all those exact same molecules, then there’s literally no difference. We don’t need someone to taste our product and say, ‘Oh, OK, I think this tastes fine,’ because we know it’s identical to the first product.”
