DATE: Wednesday, March 19, 1997             TAG: 9703180061

SECTION: FLAVOR                  PAGE: F1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY M.F. ONDERDONK, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:  115 lines

THE WINE EXPERT PROFESSOR ROY WILLIAMS IS AN EINSTEIN OF THE VINE, AND WHEN HE'S ENJOYING A GLASS OR HELPING OTHERS DO THE SAME.

ROY WILLIAM is not quite . . . one of us. He is always energetic. He is always enthusiastic. He is always dapper and well pressed.

Well - maybe not when he's got his Santa costume on. But that's December for Dr. Roy Williams, chemist, enophile and occasional impersonator of characters famous and infamous. His spring calendar is scribbled with research and teaching and papers and travel. At any rate, there will be wine. Lots of wine.

Perhaps it's the blood of the grape that keeps this 60-something scientist looking younger than his age by a couple of decades, handsome head of white hair and all.

Breaking from his work at Old Dominion University, Williams lunches at a Ghent restaurant. ``I love red wine,'' declares a heart-shaped badge on his lapel. ``I love white wine, too,'' he tells the waitress.

He sips some Georges Deboeuf viognier and confesses: ``At ODU, I like to go into the courtyard and sit in the sun and have something to eat and a little glass of wine. I'm not supposed to. But I do.'' Not that it slows him down. Not by one micron. Maybe this man has a superhero's metabolism? Or an extra strand of DNA that generates energy?

Whatever the secret of his indefatigability - one shared by all overachieving role models who leave regular people longing for happy hour - wine is what fuels the life of Roy Williams. He loves to drink it. He loves to teach it. And he loves to research it.

Recently, the Wine Institute, located in California, popped for $24,000 to fund Williams' research into the possibility that wine can forestall breast and prostate cancers. The project is one in a series this professor has led since 1992, when the ODU chemistry department created the Enological Research Facility and asked him to head it. With colleagues such as ODU chemistry professor Mark Elliot and enologist Jacques Recht, he has also studied how a ``heart-healthy'' wine could be made, and whether wine can slow down the aging process.

A number of anti-aging pills and powders made from grape seeds are, in fact, in health-food stores. Williams has some, back in the lab, including a bottle labeled ``Prolongevity.''

``I can take four of those pills,'' he says. ``Or I can drink four glasses of wine.''

To a chemist and wine lover, it's a no-brainer.

For a glass of wine holds perceptions and pleasures beyond the mysteries of science. And Williams has much to say about those too, in ``Wine Appreciation,'' a 14-week continuing education class that he teaches with the help of his wife, Sherry. Also a wine-lover, also a chemist, she's copacetic. She specializes in that most wine-compatible of substances, water.

Together they have traveled to Bordeaux and Spain and Portugal to give papers on wine, and to Siberia to do consulting on water. Next month, they'll both be presenting at a scientific conference in San Francisco.

Together, they haul bottles and grapes and bread and cheese for the weekly classes, which meet in the ODU campus center. They even bring the tasting glasses, taking them back home to Smithfield to put in the dishwasher. Sherry and Roy Williams have made this schlepp faithfully, fall and spring, since 1991. No question - it's worth the work. In these past few years, the class size has grown from 10 participants to its current 50 with a waiting list.

``Wine is a lot more fun than polymers,'' smiles Williams. In 1964, having earned a bachelor's in chemistry from ODU (then the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary) and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Delaware, he went to work for American Cyanamide in New Jersey. The following year he took a $5,000 pay cut to come back to Old Dominion and join the faculty. ``Everybody ought to do a year in an industry where they're unhappy,'' he says. Research on polymers followed.

In 1981, a year spent as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia changed his life. There, in the heart of Virginia wine country, ``I started going to wineries and festivals. When I came back, I said, `This is for me. Wine is better than polymers.' ''

It was also in Charlottesville that he conceived an admiration for Thomas Jefferson so profound that sometimes Williams simply . . . becomes Jefferson. Dressed as the legendary statesman and Renaissance man, he gives talks on the history of wine, and wine-making in Virginia.

``Jefferson was the first enologist,'' Williams says. ``I admire him for his tenacity. He spent a lifetime trying to make good Virginia wine.

``Poor guy - he lost his shirt at the end.''

Lunch over, it's back to the lab, which, with its center island and glass-fronted cabinets, resembles a super-duper kitchen.

Williams displays the last bottle of a seed-enhanced chardonnay, made at Tarara for a research study several years ago. ``I was - and still am - in love with the Virginia wineries,'' he says. ``I would love to create a Virginia white bordeaux - a beautiful blend, a white meritage. After all, chemists love to blend.''

Recently at Virginia's Incredible Edibles - a food and wine fest on the Portsmouth waterfront - Williams spent a considerable sum of his own money to mount an ``East West Challenge.'' Two hundred attendees rated Virginia varietals against comparable labels from California.

Ingleside's '95 chardonnay won over the well-regarded Hess Select of that same year. (Unfortunately, the Virginia reds did not fare so impressively.)

I've put together the lifestyle of a scientist with something of being an artist,'' he says happily. And that extends, of course, to his penchant for literal role-playing. ``For two years I went to the Virginia Wine Festival at Town Point Park as Jefferson. Then, one year I was me, in a white coat. It went over like a ton of bricks.''

He also loves playing Santa, and won a prime role as Saint Nick in the Holidays in the City Grand Illumination Parade through downtown Norfolk last November.

``You can't imagine what it's like to be up on a float and turn the corner and see thousands of cheering children. It was the rush of my life.'' The Easter bunny, whom he impersonates for the kids in his neighborhood, is a more melancholy prospect. ``You can't see where you're going. Dogs chase you. Being the Easter bunny's not much fun.'' And on Halloween, he has been known to dress up as - a mad scientist, of course, or maybe the prof from planet wine. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN

The Virginian-Pilot

Roy Williams... KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW PROFILE

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu