High Spirits at Brew U.

In California, beer and wine courses can lead to heady jobs

The sun is shining, the quarter is almost over and an enterprising band of seniors at the University of California at Davis is merrily quaffing homemade ale amidst the beakers and burners of a science lab. But wait. One of them is throwing his brew down the nearest sink. Has the ale addled his head? Have the suds gone stale?

Neither. The group is really hard at work. They are part of an 18-member malting and brewing science lab class that has just tasted and discarded a conditioned-in-the-bottle ale. The only college course on brewing in the U.S., the lab comes under the auspices of Davis' food-science department, itself part of the university's highly touted agricultural college. Beer posters adorn the walls and beer bottles crowd the shelves, but brewing is no frothy business here. Only students who have taken biochemistry, microbiology and the like can take the fall lecture course and the lab work that follows it.

The brew crew spends its days monitoring the spigots of a miniature brewery that looms like some Rube Goldberg creation in their Cruess Hall lab. After breaking down 20 commercial beers chemically, the students then create their own original product. Fruits of this term's efforts: a barley wine, a dark German-type beer and a low-carbohydrate model. But both state laws and college custom decree that all potions be discarded after taste tests. "Sentence one, day one: there will be no abuses," says Microbiologist Michael Lewis, a ruddy-faced Welshman who has taught the course since 1964.

Not far from Cruess Hall, Dinsmoor Webb, a trained chemist, heads an even bubblier enterprise: Davis' 98-year-old program of viticulture (grape production) and oenology (winemaking technology), the foremost facility and oldest department in the country.* A diminutive figure who sports dashing mixes of plaid shirts, tweed jackets and velvet bow ties, Webb reigns over 150 grape-growing acres, 14 faculty members and 155 students, all of whom have completed chemistry, physics and engineering courses before specializing in viticulture or oenology. "I think they should have a little French," says Webb, "but we don't require a foreign language any more."

Webb's domain extends underground to a huge wine cellar where some 95,000 bottles of student wine are aging gracefully. Like the beer, alas, all 95,000 bottles will go right down the drain once a panel of faculty and staff has rated their taste and bouquet. Along with such courses as "analysis of musts and wines" and "wine production," Davis offers a course on "sensory evaluation." But its strictly scientific approach sets it apart from the wine-appreciation courses that have germinated on some 300 U.S. campuses.

To Webb's oenology students, wine is not the "blushful Hippocrene" extolled by Keats but a complicated blend of ethyl alcohol, polyphenols and a hundred other compounds that must be subjected to decidedly unromantic analysis. At the moment, the department is trying to aid the time-honored sniff, sip and taste method of judging wines with a computer system that would analyze and rate mathematically the blend of compounds in wine.

Some of the brewing students are oenology majors who are merely moonlighting in beer. But others plan careers in brewery-production management. With the U.S. consuming about $17 billion worth of beer this year, jobs abound. "Starting pay in the beer industry [as high as $18,600] is often double what winery pay would be," says Senior Greg Walter. Yet wine students are confident of fruitful futures. After all, the alumni list of Davis oenology students reads like a who's who of the California wine industry: Martini, Mondavi, Wente. Which goes to prove that Bacchus is good business.

* Among others, the California State University at Fresno and Cornell also offer viticulture and oenology courses, and support research.

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