Ultrasound Machine Ages Wine

Inventor Casey Jones says his creation uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. Mr. Jones said, "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage tasting like it costs hundreds. It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt." The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like a Dr. Who ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker. I know a certain special lady who is about to have the best bottle of Boone's Farm in the world.

Comments

Whiskey?

[fiannaFailMan]

You can age Whiskey in a bottle? I thought it stopped aging as soon as it goes into a glass container. It's one of the differences between itself and wine.

Re:Whiskey?

[xgr3gx]

I think you're right. It's the barrel the does the aging.
I saw a "Modern Marvels" episode about Whiskey. I recall them saying that aging a bottle of whiskey is pointless.
If you age a bottle 8 year old whiskey for 2 years, you don't get 10 year old whiskey, you get a 2 year old bottle of 8 year whiskey.

Re:Whiskey?

[tmosley]

If you put in some oak chips. Some home brewers and small wineries age their wine this way since they can't afford a full sized oak barrel.

Re:Whiskey?

[Colin Smith]

Also... 8 year old malts *are* paintstripper. You need 12 years at an absolute minimum for something drinkable. Preferrably 15 or more years.

Adding a few ml of warm water will reduce the catch at the back of the throat for those lesser beverages.
Also, try with crystalised ginger to complement.

Ice? Coke? Go on, get off my lawn.

Re:Whiskey?

[philspear]

Well, the blurby summary may be off, but your analysis is too. Cheap wine aged may get worse, but I'm more inclined to believe that's because of impurities which degrade the flavor over time. Since this isn't actually aging, that might not be the case.

Since I have no idea how or if this thing works, and don't know what makes good wine (my standard would be does it have EtOH in it and can I put it in my stomach and not die) this is all conjecture, but keep in mind it's not a time travel machine. However it is that time tends to increase the quality of wine, this might do it specifically, in which case even crappy wine would get better. If crappy wine gets worse with age, that might not be the same process, and might not be affected by this.

Hypothetical explanation: good wine has high levels of X component, which tastes good, and low levels of Y component which tastes bad. Over time, X and Y undergo chemical changes increasing their impact. Since good wine has more X, aging will improve it. Bad wine has higher levels of Y and/or lower levels of X. Over time, the impact of Y becomes bigger, so you're better off drinking it before that.

If the ultrasonic treatment specifically causes the chemical change in X but not Y, then no matter the quality, X will increase but not Y. Doing this to good wine will make high X and low Y. Doing this to bad wine will cause high X and low Y as well.

Again (in case it's not blindingly obvious) I have little idea what I'm talking about, but the analysis that this thing can't work because bad wine gets worse over time seems very flawed. It's also a mistake to judge from a single paragraph what probably has much much longer justification and explanation.

Basically, we need a 3rd party account of someone who has tried this before we can judge. The proof is in the pudding.

Re:Whiskey?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not entirely pointless---or at least not entirely without effect. A friend and I once came into possession of a bottle of eight-year blended cheap stuff, in a crate of random boozes someone was getting rid of.

We were about to put it aside when we noticed that it didn't have a surgeon general's warning on it. This was in around 2004, and the warning became mandatory in 1989. That made the whiskey at least 23 years old (15+8), and from the packaging style, most likely another ten or twenty years older than that.

All that time certainly did have an effect on it (we bought a current run bottle of the same item for comparison afterwards.) It was incredibly smooth; one of the smoothest whiskeys I've ever had. It didn't make it good, though---it basically turned it into the Pabst Blue Ribbon of whiskey. If you were inclined, you could easily drink an eight-ounce glass of the stuff as if it were water, but in the thirty seconds before you keeled over, you wouldn't be impressed by the taste.

The new run stuff was entirely what one would expect of an eight-year cheap blend.

Re:Whiskey?

[the_womble]

Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones.

This statement is nonsensical. Whisky, and any other alcoholic drink for that matter, has one and only one alcohol, ethanol, C2H5OH. At least, it better, since any other form of alcohol is quite poisonous.

Most alcoholic drinks contain some methanol - and the drinks that contain more give you worse hangovers.

It is actually quite likely that methanol evaporates out of ageing significantly faster than ethanol, so he may well be right, but the main changes come from interactions with the barrel, oxidation, etc.

Re:Whiskey?

[es330td]

There was a great "How is it done" kind of program on the Discovery Channel about this. Not only is it kept in casks almost the entire time, they rotate the casks around the aging warehouse so that each cask gets its turn in the higher temperature upper levels of the racks and time in the cooler lower levels. It makes me appreciate my Maker's Mark that much more.

Re:Whiskey?

[Compunerd]

Chipping wine is quite common in several countries, especially Australia. I guess it's quite common everywhere except central Europe

It would be cool

[InlawBiker]

Were it true. But unfortunately you can't make bad wine into good wine just by aging it. It just becomes older bad wine.

Typically the 'age-worthy' wines are made with the choice fruit, and are designed to age by balancing the acid content with the fruit content. As the fruit mellows over time so do the acids (tannins). It is an art as much as as it is a science.

So call me a wine snob if you want, but I've tasted plenty of aged cheap wine and it's really not very good.

Re:It would be cool

[Muad'Dave]

In wine, however, expensive does not necessarily equate to a quality product. There are _very_ few people that are comfortable enough to admit that they like a less expensive wine. The parent is absolutely correct in that 'wine snobbery' is quite rampant. My wife's favorite wine is a Adolph Mueller Rheinhessen Niersteiner Gutes Domtal Spatlese. It's about $10/bottle. She absolutely adores it much to the chagrin of the chardonnay and merlot snobs at the wine store.

1963: American Society for Enology and Viticulture

[slashkitty]

They didn't like the effects of ultrasound.. http://www.ajevonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/1/23

Ultrasonic waves are the new magnets

[jandrese]

Oh ultrasonic waves, is there anything people won't claim you can do? Had this device come out 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been exactly the same except the "ultrasonic waves" would have been replaced by magnets, because that was the in thing at the time. Colliding alcohol molecules? What in the world are they talking about?

If this thing actually works as advertised I'll eat my hat.

Re:Not Necessarily a Fraud

[Richard Kirk]

Neutrons can have a similar ageing effect. The original work on this was Californian. Someone put bottles of Spanish brandiy going into a high neutron flux reactor at a facility I worked at once to see if they can reproduce the effect. I am told it went in dark brown and tasted rough, and it came out light coloured and tasted smooth. This is not really a commercial process because you could not easily market Three Mile Island Brandy. I don't expect miracles, but you might be able to produce bsome of the mellowing effect that you do get with wine in smaller timescales.

Microwaves also have funny effects on chemistry. They might be worth a try.

This gadget, though? If it really worked, then would they be selling it? Or would they be being paid by the wine industry not to sell it? Deeply suspicious.

empirical

[bugs2squash]

The booze manufacturers must be experimenting with something though. After all, it's not like their failures are unsellable. I would not be surprised to see at least some casks surrounded by magnets, copper, plutonium, ultrasound baby imagers, etc.

I'm surprised that they have not filled the LHC with wine.

Suspicious...

[D'Eyncourt]

He said: "Casey took one of our bottles and brought it back for us to try after it had been in the machine. I was amazed, it had definitely aged.

Hmm...odd that the bottle would have to leave and come back considering the "aging" device looks like it can be easily moved and takes only 30 minutes to perform its magic.