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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.'
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.
Bring back the good old days, when wine had the same social status as lager, thats what I say!
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
All a machine like this is going to do is make your wine worth less. A good well-aged wine is expensive because of the time it takes to make it. If all of the sudden you're pumping them out like cans of coke, you're going to have cheap wine regardless of how it tastes. People need to remember there is a huge traditional following where winemaking is concerned. People who truly appreciate fine wines will not buy stuff which breaks from traditional wine making.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'd like to try this out, living in Japan as I do, but if you'd ever tried shochu, perhaps you'd understand that it's not exactly that similar to wine. I personally can't stand the drink straight, but it's great in mixed drinks, the so-called chu-hai (short for shochu highball) that come in all sorts of delicious flavors.
Shochu has been very popular amongst young people lately, so there's a big market they can hit. I hope they convince a sake or wine company to try it, so I can give it a try. Here's the wikipedia link to find out more on shochu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shochu
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-200
Part of the cachet of drinking fine wines is that it is expensive and exclusive. Once you start allowing the hoi polloi to have access, it no longer becomes so special.
To make an example you'll all understand, think G-Mail invites. Specifically, when they first started getting passed around.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
People who make their own product for their own consumption is who. My brother makes his own wines for himself - imagine the fun he'd have seeing what his wine would taste like in one, two or three years with this machine. I agree - most 'real' wine makers probably wouldn't want to touch this, except for the vineyards that already 'temper' their wine to taste the same year after year like the Ernest and Julio Gallo types, but I think there's a huge home market possibility here.
What I don't understand is that BN (The type of wine tested) is produced to be drunk immediately. It is already "smooth" before the process that was mentioned even gets to it. In fact, BN doesn't age well at all, and shouldn't be drunk more than a year or two out from bottling...
Put identity in the browser.
I like wine and am rather picky. That said, if something can produce EXACTLY the same thing as the slowly aged, $$$$$ expensive, traditionally made wine, then I must ask:
Who. The. Fuck. Cares.
Tradition be damned. Technology has replaced a good deal of tradition. Though, I am sure, this device will be illegal in France.
A good deal of the character of fine wines and spirits comes precisely from the "impurities," which are actually just the various flavors present in the wine. The goal (my statements here actually apply to Scotch Whisky, with which I'm more familiar, but should generalize to wine) is to produce something with an intricate, multifaceted flavor -- exactly the opposite of what most beverage manufacturers (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) are trying to do. These sorts of "impurities" are the sort of things that set a painting apart from a photograph, or a live musician apart from a MIDI performance.
Of course, a large amount of expensive wine and spirits (likely the majority) end up being purchased by wealthy people more interested in showing off their sophistication than actually drinking the stuff; the true connoisseurs are more likely to be the college student who trades seeing movies for a couple months for a single bottle which he finishes in a couple days or the regular middle-class guy who feels somewhat uncomfortable when he goes to buy a bottle of wine at an unnecessarily metrosexual storefront than the Paris Hiltons of the world.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
The funny thing is, I happen to know people who work in the wine production industry, and I can tell you that this mumbo-jumbo isn't far off from how wine chemistry actually works. They put all sorts of bizarre and random junk in wine, and not always with clear reasons for doing so.
Note that the wine industry has also lobbied heavily to obtain exemption from ingredient labeling requirements which almost every other product is subject to. They don't want you to know what is in there...
You compare a few different things here, which aren't exactly comparable. Diamonds, for instance, are expensive primarily because DeBeers has spent over a century ruthlessly restricting supply, and creating artificial demand. The cultured diamonds are here, available, and cheap. However, the companies are facing threatening behaviour from DeBeers, legal sanctions (mostly brought about by DeBeers), and bad publicity (from...well, you know).
Wine and spirits are another matter. The market is unfortunately filled with speculators who ultimately do nothing but drive up the price of rare wines, as well as insecure rich people who buy the "right" wines with no appreciation for them. However, good wines _do_ cost more because they come from lower producing vinyards, take more care to make, and require more _real_ aging which leads to evaporation. If this device could eliminate the aging and evaporation, then it might irritate some insecure twits, but most wine lovers would be ecstatic at being able to buy world-class wine for under a hundred bucks.
Unfortunately, it's pseudoscience at its worst. Pity, really.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The product sounds like snake oil to me. The aging of alcohol is a fairly complex chemical process. It is just very hard to preferentially remove one off-flavour by, say, increasing the storage temperature, adding some funny chemical without affect a whole matrix of other related compounds, even for relative simple product like beer... (Well, my info is really from beer brewery where I had worked for a major one before.)
But, for tasting, human taster are indispensable. In the brewery that I worked for, senior lab techs were trained to taste a certain chemical level in beer. We had controls (say add extra chemical in sub ppm level to beer), regular training (put just x ppm of that chemical to distilled water such that we learnt the difference between the minute changes) and followed standard scientific practice (blinded test). Human regularly outperform the modern $100,000 machines (GC/ HPLC) for compound like diacetyl.
However, I agree that a lot of the wine "connoisseurs" probably do not know what they are talking about... they just learnt to use big word to foil the crowd.
As with anything else in life expensive doesn't automatically equal best. My goal as a person who enjoys wine is to find wine that I like and is inexpensive. Generally I drink wine costing maybe $10/bottle. There are plenty of good wines to be had for that price.
I've also had wine costing anywhere from $500-$1000/bottle. Did it taste better than the cheaper ones? The avg drinker would probably say no. Usually what an expensive bottle adds is a range of flavors that change over time as the wine is drank (among other things). It's more of an experience you share with friends than just getting a beer and getting drunk.
One more thing. Going from a $5/bottle to a $40/bottle is a huge difference in quality and taste that most people will notice. Going from the $40/bottle to the real expensive stuff adds qualities and nuances that the typical person wouldn't even notice or appreciate.
May I seriously recommend that Mr. Tanaka visit Hungary? He will be able to sell hundreds if not thousands of his equipment in a few days. Hungary, a country in Central Europe is the wine-faking centre of the world. Although Hungary has very good wine regions of its own (Tokaji Aszu and Eger Bull-blood wines), the habit of faking became fashionable in the 1970s, when USSR ordered the COMECOM countries to send astronimical amounts of wine to Moscow to combat vodka abuse, thinking wine will not hurt russian brain cells that much. It was not possible to fullfil the giant quantity of orders without discarding even the most basic rules of honest winery. Let me say grape had absolutely no role or presence in the end product, but it looked and tasted like wine (somewhat).
Even though COMECON ceased to exist in 1990, the wine faking is still a huge underground business in Hungary. Literally underground, most of the shack factories use buried railway tank waggons to mix and store fake wine. Still it takes weeks to make the stuff and there is a big risk customs authorities finding out and storming them. With Mr. Tanaka's equipment they could make it in a few hours and quckly sell it. Fake wine is usually sold in 5liter (1 gallon) plastic bottles, many homeless people drink two bottles a day. There is even a popular mocking song that celebrates this phenomenon.
Big business with almost no cost, but good profit. Mr. Tanaka would be rich in no time.
"For instance, there was a marked 30% drop in the sale of Merlot after Sideways came out."
Heh. I also noticed that my neighborhood BJ's, which prior to that movie had exactly one Pinot Noir in regular stock, now has about fifteen varieties.
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