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Fast Track to Fine Wine?
wombatmobile writes "Hiroshi Tanaka, president of Innovative Design and Technology, claims to have perfected a machine that can transform a bottle of just-fermented Beaujolais Nouveau into a fine, mellow wine in seconds. From the article: 'The road, however, won't be an easy one: the company has brought the machine around to Japanese wine producers, restaurants and even sake rice wine and "shochu" sweet potato spirit distillers, but so far only a small shochu maker in southern Japan has agreed to get involved.'
Wine snobs have their noses so far up in the air, I don't understand why they don't get nosebleeds.
My guess: This is going to turn into the same type of fight with 'natural' diamonds vs 'artificial' diamonds.
However, I give the win to Hiroshi Tanaka & Company.
Unlike the diamond industry, nobody can effectively lock you out of the alcohol business.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Even if it works it won't catch on. Wine is like exotic stereo equipment: people are paying for expensiveness.
If there's a positive effect, then the reason is something other than what they're claiming. The article gives two irreconcilable explanations for what the machine is doing. one of which is wrong and one of which is nonsensical.
This will never take off. Expensive wine is no different than expensive diamonds. People buy them because they are expensive. We've created diamonds in labs that "don't have enough impurities", according to the jewelry industry (and people seem so agree for some reason). This wine wont "have enough impurities" either.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I don't think this will effect fine wine, with all of its Traditions and it has an established community that celebrates it, almost like a religion.
With the cheaper tablewines though this will probably be good for business, wine won't have to be stored as long and better products can be served to the market. I like table wine and I have found there are some really good ones & really bad ones, something like this could improve the overall quality of the cheaper wines & make it a lot eaiser to find a good cheap wine.
With boutique beer becoming more popular & mixed drinks going into more exotic flavours and still being sold at really cheap prices, improved table wine quality would help it compete against these products.
From TFA "In the natural maturation process, the taste of wine is enhanced by the mixture of alcohol with water molecule clusters, Tanaka says." huh? I think the sugar has something to do with the taste as well.
It's made from rice. By law and common sense that makes it not-beer everywhere BUT the US.
The article babbles on about breaking up the "water clusters" and letting alcohol more fully mix with the the water to make the wine age more quickly. In fact, wine ages by a number of complex reactions both in cask storage, and later in the bottle. In particular, fine red wines age in the bottle through a series of reactions, many involving the breakdown of various tannic molecules. Also, really fine wines age over years, cheaper wines designed to be drunk early just get worse after time. If you take a five liter jug of crap wine and store it in a cellar for ten years, it just tastes like crap. I saw a lot of comments here about the snob value of wine, and how that will hold this process back. Actually the wine industry is pretty open to new technology in all but the most hidebound, traditional regions. The reason you will never here about this process again, is because it won't do anything, not because "the industry" will quash it.
The business about "water molecule clusters" in TFA sounds like nonsense from a chemical point of view. That simply isn't how wine aging works. Now, electrolysing wine certainly will have chemical effects, and it's at least halfway plausible that those effects could be similar to aging, and it's entirely probable that the reporter may not have accurately quoted the source... but the purported explanation for how it works doesn't sound like something that would come from people who had developed a technology that really did work.
Honestly, the whole wine tasting industry is mostly snake oil anyway. I can't find the link, but sone researchers did a "pepsi challenge" type of test with a group of experienced wine tasters. The result? No two wine tasters reported the same taste, body, or whatever from the same wines. Their repsonses were, in fact, wildly dissimilar.
This doesn't mean it's snake oil, it means that different people have different tastes.
Consider an analogy to movies. Not every review gives every movie that same rating, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't movies that are considered great by the vast majority and those that are considered terrible.
I took wines in college and we did a really interesting test during one of the first lectures: we passed around glasses of sugar water of varying concentrations, went through them in order of concentration, and had members of the class raise their hand once they got to a concentration they considered "sweet". The range between the high and low end was very suprising.
Just like movies, you should find a reviewer who's tastes align with yours.
Bring back the good old days, when wine had the same social status as lager, thats what I say!
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. As far as I see table wine has the same status as your typical beer. Fine wines though, are just that. They cost more to make and are much more rare than a can of Bud. They will ALWAYS have higher social status because of this.
Life is too short to proofread.
AFAIK, there's a lot more than this to wine maturation. One important effect is esterification of carboxylic acids and alcohols, which produces entirely new aromas. In lab conditions it is possible to esterify substances in a few minutes using strong catalysts such as sulphuric acid and high temperatures, but it takes months or years in a wine cellar.
Besides, as others have mentioned already, it's silly to try and mature Beaujolais Noveau, as it's meant to be enjoyed straight away after production.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
it will be vinegar
They're using their grammar skills there.
No. The editor thought so too.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Something I don't understand... Because someone is educated in a subject they are somehow a snob? So someone who likes Perl is a snob? WTF is wrong w/ everyone?
SNOB SNOB SNOB!
Atually, Beaujolais Nouveau tastes like crap wether it's fresh or not. It's marketing hype for wine that wasn't worth crap, and Japan (where I live) has it the worst. I assume that the most bottles of exported Beaujolais Nouveau comes to Japan.
Trying to age a beaujolais is simply laughable though. So yes, I agree with you.
Now give me my bottle of Bordeaux back!!
No. Stuff brewed from malted grain is beer. Rice cannot be malted. In fact, it needs to be processed with a special fungus to be rendered fermentable. Laws of the land notwithstanding, sake is not beer or even close to it.
just as there can be wines made from fruits other than wine grapes.
What makes a wine a wine comes from the process. The process of fermenting fruits is similar, no matter which fruit you use. But knowledge of brewing beer will not get you far in brewing sake, and vice versa. They simply aren't in the same category.