In Wine Country, Dogs Are Sniffing Out Threats to $325 Cabernet

(Bloomberg) -- At 6:30 a.m. in Chile’s Casablanca Valley, two Labrador retrievers named Zamba and Mamba are pawing and sniffing stacks of oak staves destined for wine barrels. International barrel-making company TN Coopers is counting on their remarkable noses to track down such harmful chemical compounds in the wood as TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) and TBA (2,4,6-tribromoanisole) that could contaminate the flavors and aromas of wine stored in one of its barrels. A signal to the trainer that the dogs have found something brings a reward treat. After a 30-minute stint, they get to rest, and another team takes on the routine.

The gifted dogs represent the company’s burgeoning Natinga Project and offer the latest example of how specially trained canines can be used to prevent vineyard pests and winery disasters. Michael Peters, the resident winemaker and sales manager in TN Coopers’s Sonoma office, says, “They’re more accurate and effective than modern technology.”

A dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than a human’s, thanks to 300 million olfactory receptors, compared to our paltry 6 million. Robotic technology lags behind as well. This has led to “man’s best friend” becoming an essential tool in tracking fugitives and people trapped in building collapses, sniffing out that Italian sausage you thought you could hide in your suitcase while passing through customs, discovering bombs before they explode, and hunting expensive truffles.

In the wine industry, dogs are being used to detect TCA and its relatives, which are the bane of winemakers everywhere. A little TCA goes a long way and is the primary cause of  “cork taint,” a musty, moldy, wet cardboard smell and taste in wines. Most people can spot it at a concentration of around 5 parts per trillion, the equivalent of a few drops in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, according to Jamie Goode, whose most recent book is Flawless: Understanding Faults in Wine (University of California Press, $23).

And it’s far from just a cork issue, says Peters. “It can also contaminate wood used for barrel staves, plastic hoses, pumps, silicon bungs [the stoppers in wine barrels], fining agents, and even infect an entire cellar.”

The financial stakes are high—and the earlier it’s identified, the quicker and cheaper the fix. Last December, for example, Napa’s Opus One winery sued one of its French barrel suppliers for more than $470,000, claiming 10 barrels had been contaminated with TCA, damaging 590 gallons of its $325-a-bottle cabernet.

TN Coopers learned this lesson a decade ago, when it bought wood for barrels that later turned out to be tainted. “We have traceability, so we could recall all of them,” says Peters. Looking for a preventive solution, the owners sought advice from a friend who worked at training dogs to sniff out bombs and drugs at airports. Could dogs help them out, too?

After training, the first two labs, Ambrosia and Odysé, started paw patrol. Then came another, Moro, and last year Zamba and Mamba joined the surveillance team. A trainer works with them daily, and the dogs know it’s time for serious inspection when he slips on their black harnesses.

Now, before the company loads its barrels into a shipping container for transport to wineries around the globe, dogs make sure there’s no TCA, TBA, or other harmful chloroanisole or bromoanisole molecules hanging around in it. Winery clients in Chile regularly request that the dogs check the state of their cellars as a side support service. A new group of puppies is being trained; next year they’ll bring their highly attuned, wet noses to clients in California and elsewhere. “I don’t think we realized how valuable they would be,” says Peters.

Dogs also turn out to be an essential weapon in grape growers’ wars against vineyard pests and diseases.

Michael Honig, owner of Napa’s Honig winery, worked with Bonnie Bergin, an educator who heads up the Bergin University of Canine Studies in Sonoma, on a project to detect vine mealy bugs that feed on vines and eventually kill them. They’re nearly invisible to the naked eye, only slightly bigger than the head of a pin, and they hide under bark and roots.

While drug-sniffing dogs are often German shepherds, Bergin works with Labs, golden retrievers, and crosses. She trained them to sniff out the pheromone of female mealy bugs, vine by vine, and to bark or make eye contact with a trainer or winemaker when they find an affected one. “If you get the bugs early, you can easily treat it without blanketing the vineyard with pesticides,” says Honig. “Using dogs is organic”—not literally, but it confines chemical treatments to only the affected vine.

Bergin wants to expand into the vineyard what dogs can do. Her latest idea is teaching dogs to sniff out vineyard nests of yellow jackets, which suck sugar from the grapes. Testing the concept is still a long way off. First, Bergin has to figure out how to train dogs to be alert to the nest without getting so close that the yellow jackets sting them. That will take funding.

Australian viticulture and animal science researcher Sonja Needs points out that dogs have multiple advantages: They’re versatile, fast, and—once trained—they can easily learn to identify 12 or more scents.

She worked at the University of Melbourne on training a border collie to detect the world’s worst grapevine pest, phylloxera, which decimated European vineyards in the 19th century. It wasn’t easy.

“The insects had to be dug up, fresh from an infested vineyard,” Needs emailed Pursuits to explain. But it took only two 20-minute training sessions for the dogs to show they could pick up the insects’ odor. She’s hoping to get funding to expand the pilot project. Research scientists at Agriculture Victoria, an Australian government agency that provides policy and research for agricultural businesses, are also pursuing the idea, hoping to develop a rapid detection method that could be used in vineyards before phylloxera actually damages the vines.

In the future, dogs such as Zamba and Mamba may have to compete with robotic sniffers, a topic discussed at the Global Aviation Security Symposium held in Montreal last December. It is the subject of research worldwide. India is already planning to roll out such mechanical pooches, claiming they’re capable of detecting explosives. 

But will they be able to track TCA and vine mealy bugs? For now, wineries are betting on Fido.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.