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.'

Comments

Smells like the same old snake oil...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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:

To the untrained palate, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 strained through the machine became a more full-bodied, complex wine. Similar treatment to a Sauvignon Blanc 2004 resulted in a drier aftertaste.

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.

Re:Smells like the same old snake oil...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:Smells like the same old snake oil...

[seifried]

John Cleese did a short documentary called "Wine for the confused." Towards the end of it he buys 5 bottles of wine ranging in price from $5 US to several hundred. He puts them in brown paper bags with laters ([A-E])and has 20 odd people try them all (some movie star friends/etc, generally people who supposedly drink a lot of expensive wine). He then asks "which wine did you think was the most expensive one" to which the various people say A, B, D, E, John Cleese then says "I'm not hearing a lot of "C." Turns out that no-one thought the most expensive wine was the best one, in fact several thought the $5 bottle was the best. The moral of the story: wine, like food and coloirs is a matter of individual taste and price often has little bearing on what we truly enjoy. Personally I can't stand Beaujolais, I've tried a few and found every single one utterly repulsive.

Wine for the Confused (2004) (TV)

Re:Smells like the same old snake oil...

[AtomicBomb]

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.

Re:Smells like the same old snake oil...

[Greyfox]

One of my old favorites for "Smooth and Mellow" used to be the Beringer reserve but it was pricey (For me) at around $60 a bottle. Pretty much every wine I tried while visiting Romania tasted as good or better to me and ran me in the neighborhood of $3 a bottle. You can't find the Beringer reserve as easily anymore and lately I've been preferring sake as I was getting tired of purple teeth. Now my favorite bottle of sake is from Horin and runs me $27 a bottle at a local liquor store, though a couple of the sushi restaurants around here charge 2 to 3 times as much for it. Horin's great cold and if I'm introducing a sake newbie to sake, it's the stuff I use.

In general I'd suggest ignoring the wine snobs and trying a few wines on your own, if you're in to that sort of thing. A good wine is one you like. Just be sure to keep notes so you'll remember which ones you like 3 months later when you're shopping for another bottle. Also, since taste is subjective, I find it worthwhile to go back every so often and try some wine you didn't like so much. Sometimes your perspective will have shifted in the intervening time and you'll like it the second time around. Of course, I think the last glass of wine out of the bottle is always much better than the first one if you drink it all at once...

Huh?

[pegr]

So who else read the headline and thought it was a story about running Windows apps on your MacIntel?

God help them

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:God help them

[Bazzalisk]

Unlike the diamond industry, nobody can effectively lock you out of the alcohol business.

Shows what you know! Alcoholics Anonymous have been running the industry from behind the scenes for years!

Re:God help them

[Belseth]

Wine snobs have their noses so far up in the air, I don't understand why they don't get nosebleeds.

I sense a beer drinker. If they ever come up with a way to turn fine British beer into Budwiser I'll let you know.

Re:God help them

[mfago]

If they ever come up with a way to turn fine British beer into Budwiser I'll let you know.

It's quite simple: drink the British, and piss into a Bud bottle.

Re:God help them

[hunterx11]

Artificial, natural, they're both the same physically. But the difference is human and intangible.

With a DeBeers diamond, an African child may well have died a result of its production. That's the human touch, and that's why people should be more impressed by a genuine natural diamond.

Into a fine, mellow wine in seconds...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why? Who wants to devalue their product?

[kuzb]

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.

no more Barrels

[TubeSteak]

heh, I just RTFA and this part made me laugh

"Think of the savings we'll make. Shorter production time, no need for storage, no need to invest in barrels," he said.

Recently, in England, they cut down a 340 yr old oak tree to make wine barrels.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2000 913,00.html

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.

Re:no more Barrels

[clifyt]

"Recently, in England, they cut down a 340 yr old oak tree to make wine barrels."

Actually -- they cut down the 340 year old tree because it was infested and needed to be destroyed before it infested other 300 year old trees around it.

The fact that the tree was well known and thus to be used for wine making is secondary. I read this the other day and treehuggers were getting all bent out of shape about it until someone picked up the full story.

But yeah, wine in a barrel tastes 'more complex'. Better? I don't know...I don't care. But the wine snobs I know can actually tell you the type of barrel it was stored in by the characteristics of the wine (apparently its not hard to figure out if you studied the subject).

Re:Why? Who wants to devalue their product?

[Sefert]

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.

Sake is Not Wine

[good soldier svejk]

Sake is not wine. It is made from grain and brewed. By law and common sense that makes it beer in the US.

Beaujolais Nouveau is SUPPOSED to be drank fresh

[BlueBoxSW.com]

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.

now...

[arghblubber]

... i was wondering for a second what tha kazaa guys had against that emulator thingy

Total snake oil

[Trotsky820]

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.

Bullshit

[swordgeek]

Hmm.

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 /. articles about too, but that doesn't make them effective.

Wine Smine

[Lord Apathy]

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.

Important effects overlooked

[TeknoHog]

FTA:

In the natural maturation process, the taste of wine is enhanced by the mixture of alcohol with water molecule clusters, Tanaka says.

Though the exact mechanism of water molecule clusters remain a matter of scientific debate, Tanaka claims the electrolysis treatment instantaneously breaks up water clusters in the wine, allowing the water to more thoroughly blend with the alcohol.

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.