Fixing the Grape; The art of winemaking is now a science, thanks to New World vintners who aren't shy about change.

Byline: Mac Margolis (With Eric Pape in Paris, Jimmy Langman in Santiago and Karen MacGregor in Cape Town)

The regional action committee of Wine Growers is not exactly part of the Axis of Evil. But when their commandos donned balaclavas and launched a series of attacks against corporate wineries and wine dealers in southern France last spring--hijacking delivery trucks, torching a train, bombing government agricultural offices and dumping 10,000 hectoliters of Chilean tinto in the streets--they got the world's attention. In recent years, the millennial art of wine and wine making has been shaken to its taproots. Plummeting consumption in Europe has led to a worldwide glut of 6.5 billion bottles a year. Worst hit is France, where producers are converting unwanted Beaujolais into vinegar and even finer vintages of Bordeaux, Loire and Burgundy into industrial ethanol. here lies the last wine grower announced the epitaph on the faux coffin borne by bereaved local vintners in a mock funeral held in late May in Nimes.

Old World wine is hardly headed for extinction. France, Italy and Spain still lead the world in making and selling wine, from plonk to superpremium. Yet in a profounder sense, the pallbearers of France were dead right. New World wine makers--Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile and California--have seen their share of global exports surge. Much of that growth is due to changing tastes, which favor the explosive flavors of New World winemaking techniques. Whereas in much of Europe, especially in France, top-heavy regulations and tradition still frown on many newer techniques--roto-fermentation to soften tannins and quicken color extraction, reverse osmosis to remove water, drip irrigation, mixing grape varieties--the emerging wine makers have no such qualms. The openness to experiment and the commitment to tailor wine to the palate--and not the other way around--are in themselves a revolution, which has evened the playing field between Old World and New. "We don't let wine judges or the producer define what wine should be," says Sakkie Pretorious, managing director of the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. "We make wine according to what the customer wants."

To do so, grape farmers and vintners the world over are calling on a whole arsenal of sophisticated gadgets and arcane-sounding techniques such as roto-fermentation, microoxygenation, reverse osmosis, infrared spectrometry and computerized vineyard models. Nowhere have these tools been applied so avidly as in the New World--perhaps because vineyards there had little choice. Australians have modernized bottle closings to beat ruinous "cork taint" and mastered drip irrigation, which delivers precision jets of water to some of the world's most arid vineyards. With as many as five different soil types found in a single vineyard, the South Africans have excelled in soil analysis. A Chilean company called Ingenium, using NASA technology, has developed an infrared ray gun that scans grapes for sugar and acidity without puncturing the fruit--data that ordinarily would take weeks to gather back in the lab. "Europe has heritage," says Jim Fortune of the Australian Grape and Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. "We had R&D."

Now vintners can practically build the wine they want by manipulating scores of strains of yeast and commandeering minuscule doses of the nearly 800 key chemicals and compounds bundled up in grapes. Want a tropical glow in your Chardonnay? Choose the right strain of yeast or turn down the temperature of the fermentation vat to unlock ...