All I Really Needed to Know About Chemistry I Learned in High School (with Apologies to Robert Fulghum)

(This is the transcript of the Keynote talk I gave to the York College (PA) Chemistry Industry Advisory Council on April 3, 2025.) (It's a lot more interesting with the slide show playing behind me.)

 The first thing I will say is, there are a lot of people here in the room who probably don't get that reference. You're probably all born post-1990 because Robert Fulton wrote a best-selling book back in the 80s called "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Yes, exactly. It had some great points of wisdom in it, such as share everything, play fair, don't hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, don't take things that aren't yours, say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. These are all good things that we should all know and take to heart. They work really well going forward in our lives and would really help us make a much more fun society to be part of.

By the way, these pictures you see up here have nothing to do with my talk. They are just here to make me more interesting, just like that glass of wine in front of you. I'm a whole lot more interesting when you've got wine.

So for me, yes, I took high school chemistry, mostly because my dad forced me to. I look back on those courses—there were only two, by the way, like a year and a half; it wasn't much—and I realized that on a certain level, the things I learned there actually helped me going forward and helped me become who I am today.

So what did I learn? Well, the first thing I learned was that I wasn't good at sitting in class. Secondly, I also learned that back in the 80s, we had these open lunches, and as a kid in the 80s, I'd go out with my friends at lunchtime from my high school and we could try to attempt to eat 80 slices of pizza between four of us, which we never accomplished, at a local pizza place. But what we realized was, if you come back to class at that point, you fall asleep in class. That works also. So those are the things I kind of pulled away from my high school chemistry classes.

Now, of course, this is not helping and perhaps not encouraging you all to take a career in chemistry. I will say, I really enjoyed how a lot of you poke fun at yourselves a little bit as being chemists and introverts and things like that. I think that's wonderful. I try to do the same thing, and for us with alcohol involved, it makes it a whole lot more fun.

There are things I really did take home with me and have taken forward in life. I still remember Boyle's Law. That's the one thing I remember from chemistry. It's very important—I'm sure you guys think it's very rudimentary, but it actually applies to a lot of things that I do in my life because I deal with liquids. A lot of times chemists are thinking about liquids as lubricants. I think somebody talked about oils being like the blood of things. Well, for us, lubricants include alcohol because it's a different kind of lubricant.

The other things I learned about in my chemistry classes was the fact that you could know that there's a world out there that you could actually encounter and understand through different parts of your brain. You could just think about things and learn things, and you think, "Okay, I understand the world just a little bit better." The crazy thing is, it wasn't just my 17-year-old or 16-year-old self sitting in a class knowing this and thinking, "Wow, this is mind-blowing." But if you think about history, you go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, they understood atoms—Democritus thought about atoms. So here I am, two thousand years later, learning about the same stuff that these people knew about 2,000 years before me, and it was nice to know there's rationality to this world. There are things that really make sense.

Thinking of later scientists, one of my favorite quotes is from Galileo. He once said that "wine is sunlight held together by water." It's very strange to think of a scientist being that poetic, but he's right. Wine for me is kind of where I ended up, but I'm going to trace my way backwards through the chemistry.

If you look at wine in general, you have a big puzzle in front of you. Now I know a lot of you guys are friends of chemists and things like that. This has nothing to do with those kinds of things. But for me, you take a look at wine, and it's a puzzle piece of different components, whether it's aldehydes and phenols and tannins and flavonols and anthocyanins and stuff. These things all come together at a certain point, and they're all held together in wine. It's extremely complicated, and even though I was bored with chemistry as a teenager, as I became an adult, it became really important for what I was doing. I ended up realizing at a certain point that even though I couldn't sit still in class and understand Avogadro's number and all these other things, I actually really needed certain concepts. I needed to understand why what I was seeing in winemaking was leading me in certain directions.

So how did I end up in winemaking? I will say that when you end up with something in wine, there's got to be some kind of draw to the wine. You've got to have something that pulls you there. For me, a lot of it was that puzzle. It was the mystery. But because I was not somebody who was destined for academics, I needed to have something that pulled me in.

When we talk about wine, we talk about the grape growing and the winemaking. There is a saying that says "wine is made in a vineyard." It's kind of a hokey saying, but there is truth to it. I can taste a wine and tell you a lot about how it was grown and probably where it was grown because we can taste these things in the wine. There are certain things that make a wine taste a certain way. I won't say anything about the wines we had here tonight—they were serviceable—but I can tell you a lot of them were not really made in a vineyard. They were actually made more in a cellar, and there's a more food science aspect to those at that point.

What I will tell you is that what leads a person into wine isn't necessarily that they think, "Okay, I've got this passion for X." It's almost like you have a passion for mystery instead of X. Maybe chemistry is anathema to that idea, but I'm going to propose it really isn't. It's actually kind of a tool for understanding that kind of mystery.

As Jesse mentioned before, my dad's a physicist, my mom's a microbiologist, and I ended up for some stupid reason being a philosophy major. I don't recommend it, just so you know. You can get a really good job being a truck driver or working in a furniture plant or delivering produce and stuff like that. It's not conducive to good salaries or anything else. What it is conducive to, though, is giving you a wide range of skills.

So for myself as a 29-year-old, I ended up with a life where I had a lot of skills but no focus. I was really fortunate to have winemaking kind of fall in my lap. It was a unique experience. It was in 1998, I was up at Penn State at a winery called Mount Nittany Winery, volunteering to run a weed whacker through their vineyards. That was August. September rolled around, harvest came around, and if you've ever been around a winery at harvest, it's a magical experience. Right, Darcy and Amanda? It's magical. It is a lot of work. It's an amazing experience because it's the culmination of a lot of things. At a certain point, you start to see that all your hard work, everything you've done, is culminating in these little globes on this little rachis that actually taste like something. Through your hard work and through your processes, they become something really unique.

When we go out and work in the vineyards in the summertime, we end up having all sorts of different skills that are applied to the canopy management, the yield control, the different fungicides and insecticides we have to spray. It all comes together in the late harvest when you actually go out and pick the grapes and bring them into the winery. You crush the grapes, you process them—and by the way, this is something that some of the interns from your college got to experience. They got to see all of these things happen. Only one of them actually got involved in the summertime activities, but then you start to make the wine. You can start to taste the fruits of your labor.

I know there's a lot of industry here, and I would venture to guess that there are a lot of fruits of your labor that you probably don't want to taste. I'm fortunate in that we get to actually taste what we're working towards. There's a magical feeling that comes with working in the summertime, growing the grapes, harvesting them, making the wine, and then following that process into a bottle. Not only that, you end up going past just the bottle part and seeing what happens in tasting the bottles, letting people try them.

As I mentioned before, we are making products that end up bringing people happiness. It makes us happy to make these products. You get to come out to a winery, taste wines, see these things, taste what we've been working towards, and then take them home and share them with your family and create a culture, create an experience in your house that allows you to get a glimmer of what we are trying to do in our vineyard and winery.

But that said, none of this would be possible without the basis of what I learned back in high school, which was seeing what is capable of being known. We end up working towards something and having issues along the way. Every vintage that we have, especially recently because of the change in our climate, our chemistries are different. As winemakers, we are not doing anything by recipe. Every single time we make a wine, every single year we make wine, it tastes differently, even though we are picking the grapes from the same place and making wines in a similar manner. Every single year, the wines taste differently.

So we are kind of like chefs. If you ever ask a great chef, "Can I get the recipe for that?" it's really hard because they don't write the stuff down. It's not about trying to figure out, "Oh, you need a teaspoon of this and a tablespoon of that." It's about listening to the ingredients and doing something with them. Brewers and bakers have recipes; winemakers and chefs do not have recipes, and that is really key.

But the key thing for us is, you'd think, "Okay, if you're a chef or a winemaker, there must be just an art, a feel to this." Well, there is, but the key component isn't just the art part. There is a symbiotic relationship between the art of making wine and the science of making wine—and actually the chemistry behind it all. When I look at my glass of wine from any given vintage, yes, they all taste differently. I can taste the difference in all these wines, but the bottom line is, I realized that if I want to change this, if I want to make better wine, I need to know what's going on behind the curtain a little bit.

I had a really good friend who just retired a few years ago. His name is Brad, and he had a winery locally. He had a PhD in chemistry and had two startups in chemistry, and he and I, for some reason, got to be really good friends starting 20 years ago when I was really a rookie winemaker. I would call him up with questions and got the same response as Jesse gives me, which is like, "Brad, what's going on here?" and he's like, "Yeah, that's chemistry, but that's not my chemistry. I don't know that stuff."

The weird thing is, sometimes he would ask me about things, and it wasn't because I knew chemistry. It was just about observation. I was one of the people who was taking the puzzle pieces and making a puzzle over in my part of the cellar, and he was making his own puzzle based on how we understood the chemistries to work together—and not just the chemistry, so to speak, but really how the chemistries play out in the bottle. In that "sunlight held together by water," in that liquid poetry as they call it in Napa, what is it that's making all those flavors do all that stuff?

What I've realized is, when he and I would come up against a wall, that's when we actually turn to people like you all—turn to the professionals. We have folks at Penn State and Cornell and Virginia Tech, and I can ask them questions. There are other people who've been doing the same thing for hundreds of years in chemistry who can answer these questions, but the divide that happens is you have to somehow be able to bridge that gap. We have to get that kind of knowledge into people like me.

I'm very fortunate because I was exposed at a young age to chemistry in high school because my dad forced me to, like I said, but at a certain point, you still have to have an openness. You have to have the ability to say, "This is important to me. I need to know this kind of information, and this is going to make my product better."

At a certain point, I can go back to the title of my talk here: "Everything I Needed to Know About Chemistry for Making Wine I Learned in High School." I learned how to titrate. I learned what acids and bases are. I can do certain things great. I can make wine that's drinkable. I can make wine that will sell. But the real question is, when you're really trying to push the envelope—which is really what research is, research is trying to push that envelope in every different direction—but when it comes down to trying to push the envelope to make better wine for me, I've got to get you all involved. I've got to get people who know more than just high school chemistry, and probably more than just college chemistry, too, just to be honest about it.

This is how I've operated in the past, trying to figure things out, and I still have not stopped. Again, you can ask Darcy and Amanda what it's like in harvest with me changing my mind constantly because fruits change every year. The chemistries change, but on top of that, we need to understand what's going on so we can make better wine down in the future. Finding out why this happens and getting research done and getting people who know these things already, who've already done the research, is really important for us to make better wine and for me to ultimately be a much happier winemaker and be able to pull off what I've been trying to do for years.

You all chose chemistry. For me, it was kind of forced upon me. I ran away from it in high school. I've had to come back to it and find my answers. If there was a chemistry YouTube channel for wine, I would watch it. I would subscribe right away. For me, it's very focused and specifically for a specific thing. I struggle to live in a world where I don't know things, and having people out there who can help answer these questions is really important.

So even though I think that everything I need to know to make wine I learned in high school chemistry, it really comes down to: if I had the wherewithal to sit in a classroom and be able to learn what you all have learned, applied it, and be able to make posters like the students here have made, at this point, I don't think Pennsylvania wine would have the same reputation that it does. Unfortunately, we're stuck with me as the best we can get. With my limited knowledge at this point, all I can hope for is that we just make wines better and better each year with the help of some better chemistry expertise.

Thank you very much.

Q&A Session

Question: How do you deal with not being able to sit still in class but still wanting to learn things constantly?

Answer: Coffee and YouTube. I'm sorry, as someone with a major dose of ADHD, this is what you have to do. Unfortunately, my dad is a brilliant guy. He's written graduate texts for physics. I don't know how the heck he does it. I cannot sit, and it's amazing that I even graduated from college, to be honest with you.

You've got to figure out what works for you. A lot of people, especially as you graduating seniors, there are many people who give you lots of advice, and they'll tell you to follow your passion. I knew a podcaster who says people who tell you to follow your passion are people who are rich already. Don't listen to that. You need to not follow your passion. Compare what you're good at. For me, what I was good at was I was semi-good at a bunch of things, and then I got really, really lucky. If you ever have a choice to be lucky or good at something, choose luck. I got lucky and winemaking fell in my lap, and for some reason, I've gotten enamored with it, and things have kind of worked out. So you need to get lucky at a certain point. But yes, YouTube and coffee and evenings are wine.

Question: How is the climate in Southern York County changing, and how does that affect specifically what you do with the grapes?

Answer: First up, Southern York County is blessed with incredible soils for growing grapes. The soils here on this side of the Susquehanna River are much better for grapes because they're not so fertile as they are in Lancaster. We have low pH and high stress and clay contents with lots of iron, and that really is the brutalizing part of the grape growing, which when you're trying to grow fine wines is really important. When you're actually growing grapes, they grow a lot of green stuff throughout the year, but you want them to focus on the red things, the berries. If they're really happy and very fertile, they'll keep growing more and more green stuff. And we don't drink the green part. We drink the berry part. Part of it is, we're fortunate. York County has these really crappy soils, to be honest.

That said, climate change is a very real problem that we're trying to face. I will say it's a double-edged sword. My dad did research, especially for the German government back in the 70s, and he knows about the climate data changes that were happening in the 70s, and he used to tell me about it in the 80s, so I've been thinking about this stuff since I was a little kid, and it's the one thing in the world that frightens me.

But I will say that the double-edged sword in a positive way is that back in the 80s and 90s, York County was on the limit of growing degree days to ripen grapes and make good wine. These days, we finally have plenty of heat, which is the positive that, at least in my mind, offsets a lot of the negative repercussions.

Most importantly for us is the amazing amount of flux and chaos that we're getting. We can't trust weather forecasts as much as we could 20 years ago. We have extreme weather events, and we have so much more wind these days than we did 20 years ago, so it's much more challenging on top of the fact that it's already harder to grow grapes here than on the West Coast. They have such an easy time, but I've got a really good friend of mine who says the best wines in the world are made in marginal climates, and I can't think of a more marginal climate than York County.

Question: You talked a lot about making a better wine. What is that actually?

Answer: You're speaking to the philosophy side that I've been trying to shut away for the last 30 years. I don't understand what quality is, and if somebody could explain quality to me, I would really appreciate it. I mean, there's a relativistic quality where you say, "Well, this is better than that." But then there's always got to be a barometer, like why? What's the litmus test? What makes this better than that? And specifically with taste, taste is so personal. Everybody's taste is just a little bit different.

When you're discussing wines and you say, "Oh, I taste black cherry in here," I go, "Okay, seems like cherry to me too." And if I were to say, "Okay, yeah, but it tastes like there's a little hint of mushroom in there," the power of the mind is amazing because I can get you to taste things that you probably didn't taste. It's the power of persuasion.

So the question—what makes something better? I don't know. There's a stylistic question there, which is really, when I go to try to make a wine better, I want to go in a good direction, and that's when I sometimes ask people who know a lot more than I do to help me figure that out.

I will say soils on the East Coast have higher potassium levels, which means the must, which is the fermented grape juice we have, has a higher pH level. In order to counteract that, we end up adding tartaric acid to pull that potassium out, but then we throw off all sorts of other chemistries, and we have to put carbonates in later on to kind of de-acidify things. That's not what we want to do, but the question is, I'm trying to make a certain wine a certain style, so that's what I end up doing right now. Is that the best wine? I don't know.

On the other end of the spectrum, I will say people can identify what's a bad wine, what is a flawed wine, or what is a wine that they just don't like, and the question is how to avoid that. That's the other way of making a better wine—avoiding things that people don't like. When you have Cabernet Sauvignons that taste like bell pepper and the acidity is really high, and the tannins taste green because the flavanols are associated with those, those are weird tastes that tell you we don't want to go there. We want to go in another direction, and so we know now a bit about how to grow the grapes better to get to those ends. The question is, what is that end? What is that endpoint? I don't know what that endpoint is, but I know we can get better. The question is if we're heading in the right direction.

Question: Can you give us a little commercial about what you have, where are the grapes grown, and what types of wines and others?

Answer: I'm really bad at commercials and self-promotion. That's why I hire people to do that for me. I will say we make three brands you might have heard of. It's Allegro Winery—it's been around since 1980, it's the original winery—which is my friend Brad I referenced earlier, who's the chemist whose brand I bought, and we make wines under that label as well. And we also have a winery called Cadenza Vineyards which makes old-school Bordeaux-style wines from a vineyard that was planted back in 1973. I did not plant it, by the way. I was three years old that year. It was planted in '73. Two musician brothers ran it for about twenty years from 1980 to 2000, and I took it over from the surviving brother at the time.

We make a wide range of wines. The Cadenza brand is Bordeaux-style red and white wines. The Pinnacle Ridge brand is mostly aromatic whites, and the Allegro brand has some dry white wines. I love a lot of sweet wines, which is really what the Allegro brand is known for.

We farm about 15 acres of grapes. There are about 20 acres of grapes in York County, and according to my friend who was a Penn State Extension agent, he said that there are two grape counties that will make world-class wines in Pennsylvania, and that's York and one other county. He worked for Penn State so he could say it publicly, but I do not.

Unfortunately, York County only has 20 acres, of which we have 15 of them, because there are not many wine drinkers compared to, say, Lancaster, Chester, Montgomery County, and so on. Usually, when you find vineyards, you find them associated with population centers, and York County—yes, we have 450,000 people, but we have a lot more beer drinkers. So I'm in a minority.

Here's your commercial: because there are a lot of beer drinkers in York County and in Pennsylvania in general, we're also starting a brewery. We've gone over to the dark side. But to be fair, that is how I got my start when I was 23, making beer, so thank you very much.