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?

[Half-pint HAL]

Yup indeedy. Whisky "ages" by leeching oils from the wood it's casked in.

Also, making a blend taste like a single malt is a ridiculous claim. It's akin to claiming a device can turn fruit-punch into pineapple juice. Where do the other flavours go?

HAL.

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?

[pete-classic]

It's an ultrasonic wallet-opener.

-Peter

Re:Whiskey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the quack scientist who "discovered" this doesn't know the first thing about whisky, or wine for that matter.

What separates four-dollar (yes, the article says pounds, but in case you didn't realize, the UK has enormous alcohol excises that more than make up for the lousy exchange rate) wine from hundred dollar wine isn't that the more expensive is aged, it's that it's better made to begin with. Most cheap wine, if you age it, just gets worse over time. The region it's made in, the type of grape used, and the climate of particular vintage are what makes the biggest difference, an unaged bottle from a good vintage is usually far better than an aged bottle from a lousy one.

tl;dr Dude doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:Whiskey?

[Kemanorel]

Whiskey most definitely is aged in oak casks, for quite a long time at that. Some distillers use fresh casks while others use casks that had been previously used for sherry. Some may use a sequence of casks even, or may have different types/lines that require certain types of casks. I know the scotch I drink has several different vintages. They age for a various number of years, again for the Glenlivet, that can be 12, 15, 16, 18, 21 years or more. The difference between each vintage is noticeable, primarily in the smoothness and variety in tastes.

Re:Whiskey?

[TyrWanJo]

Oxidization is generally pretty bad for most alcoholic drinks (oxidization is the main component in bottle aging in wine, but much of this has to do with the interaction of the oxygen with tannins and other stuff in the wine - http://www.allbusiness.com/trends-events/trends/11429124-1.html). The oak or whatever wood being used is porous, and this allows some of the alcohol to evaporate (particularly with distilled stuff, wine doesnt spend as much time in the barrel, so it doesn't lose as much in the way of alcohol) . Good stuff does stay in a cask for a long time for just this reason, not only does it pick up more of the good flavor, but the "angel's share" is greater, which mellows the alcohol. New casks are required in America, where it is law that no barrel be used twice, in Europe however, there is no such law, and barrels are used multiple times because this imparts different flavors, which is how you can get a sherry-wood scotch, its literally a scotch aged in a barrel once used for sherry.

Re:Whiskey?

[NekSnappa]

Scotch is aged in used oak casks which they buy mainly from American bourbon makers. As one of the criteria for a whiskey to be called "bourbon" (along with the percentage of corn in the mash, where it is made etc.) is that in be aged in new charred oak barrels. Since the bourbon makers can't reuse their casks they sell them to scotch makers.

So there is a good chance that there is a bit of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, or maybe even Jack Daniels (even though it is actually Tennessee whiskey not bourbon) in your favorite scotch.

Re:Whiskey?

[clam666]

My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.

As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).

Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".

When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.

These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.

If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.

Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those

Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.

Re:Whiskey?

[retchdog]

I didn't know they made urinals out of beechwood.

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.

Yeah but...

[Entropy98]

Can it make regular snake oil taste like 30 year old snake oil?
--
  Blackshot

As a bonus, it ages snake oil too...

[nweaver]

As an extra special bonus, it acts to rapidly age cheap snake-oil from the rancid dead rattler-junk it started out as to something equivelent to the finest age tawny boa extract.

Re:English winemaker?

[fiannaFailMan]

When it gets the nod of a French winemaker or a vintner from California I'll be a little more intrigued.

Global warming will probably give English winemakers some credibility in years to come. (No 'funny' mod points please, I'm being serious.)