Technology of the highest order has guided winemakers seeking the perfect bottle (or early on, the perfect clay jug) for more than 7,000 years: Their taste buds.

Michael Cleary, senior manager of grape and wine chemistry for E&J Gallo Winery, said yesterday that Gallo now dispatches grapes through the high-end gadgetry of analytical chemistry to detect with greater specificity what tongues have known for millennia. "It takes good grapes to make good wine and we're trying to improve our predictions of when to harvest," he told a group at a national American Chemical Society powwow in San Francisco. Chromatography scatters grapes into the molecules that compose them. Spectrometers identify compounds in the separated juice. When the right concoction of aroma and taste molecules show up, it's time to reel in the vines. Perhaps wine scientists will eventually excise the costly and laborious work of planting, tending and harvesting, and like other arms of industrial chemistry, synthesize natural flavors from straight from petroleum.