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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.
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.