Slashdot Mirror
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.'
This seems to be a variation on the theme of enhancing wine tate through the use of magnetic fields, as exemplified by such products as The Wine Clip, Wine Cellar Express, The Perfect Sommelier, and others.
Being, as I am, an aficionado of cheap wine, this has been a subject of interest for me. Unfortunately, it seems that every 'study' done on the subject that bears out the magnet treatment theory has not been done in a properly rigorous scientific fashion, while any study done in such a fashion fails to find any correlation between treatment by magnetic field and improvement of taste.
Speaking of properly rigorous scientific studies (or lack therof), from TFA: No mention of any scientific-ish study to determine objectively whether or not the machine has any positive effects. I fear this may just be the same old snake oil all over again.
Until I see the results of a few double-blind studies on the effects of this device, I'm suspending judgement.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
So who else read the headline and thought it was a story about running Windows apps on your MacIntel?
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!
Only problem is that drinkers must be accelerated to relativistic speeds to be effective. Innovative Design and Technology is currently looking for funding to clear this final, minor hurtle to the process.
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!
I wonder if they've learned from the Simpsons and are just adding antifreeze...
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.
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
Sake is not wine. It is made from grain and brewed. By law and common sense that makes it beer in the US.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Beaujolais Nouveau is SUPPOSED to be drank right after a short fermentation process. It tastes like CRAP if it's allowed to age more than 6 months.
In france they have festivals mid-november, when the year's Beaujolais Nouveau's are officially allowed to be drank.
... i was wondering for a second what tha kazaa guys had against that emulator thingy
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.
Beaujolais Nouveau is best when it is young. The third Thursday of November is the day it's shipped.
Semper ubi sub ubi
Was I the only one thinking FastTrack wanted to fine the Wine project for something?
... is supposed to be drunk immediately anyway, so trying to turn it into a more "aged" wine is kind of defeating the purpose. wine snobs from all over travel to france every year to drink this wine on the day it comes out. personally, i can't stand beaujolais nouveau anyway, so maybe this would make it more bearable, but for those who do enjoy it this is kind of pointless.
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.
"Platinum electrodes provide the juice, driving negative ions - the cause of acidity - from the wine into the water."
wtf? Free protons (H+) or hydronium ions are the cause of acidity, not negative ions!
The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty.
Why is this on here? We are nerds, we don't care about wine. It's moonshine we are interested in. Figuring out the fermination process, the complex weaving of pipes. Stealing the shit required out of the school lab....
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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.
Unfortunately these inventions are always bought up by the powerful french wine cartel and shelved. Or worse sometimes these inventors meet their untimely demise. So sad.
Hmm.
/. articles about too, but that doesn't make them effective.
Tannins can be polymerised, compounds can be oxidised, but a large part of what makes a good wine good is what it absorbs from and loses to the barrel. Furthermore, oxidatisation doesn't occur evenly through a wine (tends to be more surface area effect than all the way through) which means that different parts of the wine in the barrel are different, and blending them adds complexity.
This (a) can't work well, and (b) doesn't work. I've got some audiophile toys which I could write
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Bah, wine. Keep your fine wine, give me a good bourbon or a scotch any way. You keep your wine, I'll keep my scotch and I can be drunk and passout on the floor in half the time you can.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
This is just nonsense.
Beaujolais Nouveau is deliberately not aged (so as to not release tannins). Even once it has been delivered to your shelves, it is meant to be consumed right away. It is specifically designed to be a light, almost fruity red, rather than a strong, full-bodied expensive and long-aged wine like say a bordeux. Applying a technology to age it... completely misses the point of this varietal.
This Wine Is Not Emulated.
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.
Imagine how much one can save if the wine is made with dehidrated water to reduce shipping costs and then zap treated into quality wine...
Oh well, what the hell...
I drank shochu when I was in Japan; I liked the flavored ones (shiso flavor is nice) and mixed drinks but I agree, by itself it is terrible. It's as good a mixer as vodka though because it's a clear flavor and it accentuates other flavors you mix it with. I'm surprised I haven't seen it in the US. Korean Soju, however, is pretty popular on the west coast, mostly because some enterprising lobbyist got the state of CA to pass a law declaring Soju is in the same category as wine for bar licensing purposes (meaning it can be sold with only a beer/wine license). Like Shochu, it pretty much sucks on its own, but it's a good clear mixer. I've never drank them side by side but I suspect they are actually basically the same drink.
This device is bogus. I've tried many of the so-called "aging devices" and they don't work. Tasting Notes don't lie. You cannot take cheap wine and make it good. Wine is only as good as the grapes, care and resources that went into producing it.
That's not to say you can't make wine taste different, and it's well known that even marginal red wine, if "aged" will change its taste and sensory profile. Sometimes this is better, sometimes it is worse. But thousands of years has shown that a wine's aging potential is related to its initial quality and care.
This doesn't stop people from trying to come up with goofy devices though. However, if you want to "age" wine, just leave it in your car for a little while. I won't promise it will taste better, but it will have more mileage on it.