Old wine in a new bottle

[RoyG]

I seem to remember SWIFT occasionally mentioning the magnetic wine conditioners that are supposed to turn the worst plonk into fine vintages. Well according to the Daily Telegraph here in London, there's a new £350 ultrasonic machine that does much the same thing.

A Casey Jones is selling this gadget and claims to have the endorsement of an actual winemaker.

I wonder if it's ever been tested blind?

Nah. Of course it hasn't.

(Sorry, but it seems that as a newcomer, I can't post URLs, but a Google search should find the article without too much trouble)

[leon_heller]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3115492/Ultrasound-machine-turns-cheap-plonk-into-fine-wine-in-30-minutes-says-inventor.html

I don't believe it, either. Making a pyramid out of some sticks and putting the wine under it probably works just as well.

Leon

[lionking]

"Casey Jones, a-steaming and a-rolling". Takes me back to the 50s.:)

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

But... but I... I LIKE paintstripper scotch!

[Senex]

A lot of booze enjoyment is suggestion. I remember my freshman year in college the local liquor store had a special on a gallon of their own label vodka. A gallon of Roger's vodka for what a pint of the good stuff costs. That swill was worse than paint thinner. Since it has always been against my religion to throw booze out I came up with a way of using it up without ruining my own internal organs. I kept filling up a bottle of expensive Russian vodka I had with Roger's. Nothing but the good stuff for my good buddies who came to visit ;) They would take take a gulp of my strong vodka and tonic mixture, their eyes would get big, they would fight off gaging and then smile and say, "This Russian stuff is sure tasty!" They would go home later I'm certain shaking their head at their own pallette's inability to differentiate good vodka from crappy vodka.

I'm certain the magnetic wine conditioner is woo -- but if you pour the swill into an expensive bottle and then pour it into your friend's glasses with a straight face you will go unchallenged as the man who buys the expensive wine.

BTW -- I no longer do stuff like that. My liquor cabinet is what it is :rolleyes:

[leon_heller]

Many years ago I worked in a group with a very stingy boss. One Christmas, when I was away, he treated everyone to a tot of scotch in their morning coffee. When I got in the next day he gave me some in my mug and I went back to our office and tried it, neat. The mean bugger had watered it down! It tasted as if it was half scotch and half water.

Leon

[Madalch]

I listened to an "audio wine course on tape" which had a number of stories like that. People would send back martinis for being "too sweet" (even though they had not a drop of vermouth in them); the bartender took the drinks, poured them into different glasses, and the customers thought the new martinis were much better.

[Madalch]

That's an odd expression. Wouldn't you want to put new (cheap) wine in old bottles, so you can sell it off as an 1877 vintage?

[Biscuit]

ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle.

I prefer to collide them into a glass and then straight to my belly. This method recreates the effects of being drunk.

[Psi Baba]

I listened to an "audio wine course on tape" which had a number of stories like that. People would send back martinis for being "too sweet" (even though they had not a drop of vermouth in them); the bartender took the drinks, poured them into different glasses, and the customers thought the new martinis were much better.
The little bit of vermouth actually makes the martini taste drier, despite the nomenclature that a "dry" martini has less vermouth. Straight gin has a somewhat sweet taste, whereas dry vermouth, like other dry wines has the necessary astringency to make the cocktail taste drier. The term "dry martini" was meant to distinguish it from the way it was originally made--with sweet vermouth.


This whole wine machine is of course, bogus. Every time I see a description of something like this, it is obvious they haven't a clue what they're talking about. It fails to take into account several important facts. For wine, a vintage refers to when it was made not how old it is. There is a huge difference here. The weather, soil conditions, etc at the time the grapes were growing all has to do with the final taste. The only wines that are actually aged upwards of 10, 20 years or more are fortified wines, such as port, sherry, and madeira.

"It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt.
Nonsense. You can't just simulate barrel aging. Most of the flavor of whiskey comes from the vanillins and other compounds that the alcohol leeches from the barrel over long periods of time. And no "ultrasound" gizmo is going to remove the nasty stuff that results from improper distilling practices.

[ksbluesfan]

This is sort of off topic, but Mythbusters tested the myth that you could create good vodka by filtering cheap vodka six times. Kari couldn't tell the good stuff from the bad stuff, Jaime was mostly right, and the professional vodka taster was able to perfectly arrange them from unfiltered cheap vodka, to vodka filtered once, twice, etc. to high-end vodka.

[Madalch]

This is sort of off topic, but Mythbusters tested the myth that you could create good vodka by filtering cheap vodka six times. Kari couldn't tell the good stuff from the bad stuff, Jaime was mostly right, and the professional vodka taster was able to perfectly arrange them from unfiltered cheap vodka, to vodka filtered once, twice, etc. to high-end vodka.

Actually, the filtering was through activated charcoal, which is pretty much the same stuff lining the barrels that alcohol is usually aged in- it absorbs the fusel oils, esters and other nasties that give the cheap vodka its flavour. (Of course, the barrels also have charred wood from which the alcohol can absorb flavours, but that's another process.)

I wouldn't recommend doing that to scotch or anything else that is supposed to have complex flavours, since the charcoal will strip it out. (Feel free to test this- I'm not going to.)

[RoyG]

That's an odd expression. Wouldn't you want to put new (cheap) wine in old bottles, so you can sell it off as an 1877 vintage?

Well, yes, that's the usual phrase but I thought this was an old con in a new machine, so I inverted it

[Myriad]

Another point to consider is that if this actually worked, cheap wine would already taste like fine vintages because wine makers would have discovered it decades ago and they'd be using it on every bottle of wine they ship.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Horatius]

Another point to consider is that if this actually worked, cheap wine would already taste like fine vintages because wine makers would have discovered it decades ago and they'd be using it on every bottle of wine they ship.

Respectfully,
Myriad



Well, some of the simplest inventions are still not very obvious, so it's reasonable to think they may not have found it themselves.

So turn this on it's head: if this works, why isn't every producer of cheap rotgut using such a device on their product, to instantly improve their quality? Why waste time figuring out a better means of aging, or whatever, when you can just blast it with ultrasound? A quick, cheap precess that would allow you to sell essentially the same product for a lot more money....

[richardm]

Nonsense. You can't just simulate barrel aging. Most of the flavor of whiskey comes from the vanillins and other compounds that the alcohol leeches from the barrel over long periods of time. And no "ultrasound" gizmo is going to remove the nasty stuff that results from improper distilling practices.

It won't make any actual difference but humans can be surprisingly easily conned when it comes to taste. This anecdote from the author Iain Banks springs to mind:


James had been given a bottle of Laphroaig [for his 40th birthday] by one of his friends; a 40-year-old, appropriately. I was pretty much just used to the 10-year-old and I'd never seen a 40 year old Laphroaig (disappointingly, it looked like the plain label design hadn't changed much in the intervening years). I felt quite privileged that James had chosen this as our mind-lubricating dram of the day. We both sipped it, savoured it, and agreed it was something very special indeed. We kept on taking small sips as we went through the book.
...
Released from concentrating on the book my gaze fell on the bottle sitting on the far edge of the table, near the wall. Maybe the light was falling on it in just such a way as to make the chicanery obvious - I don't know - but for whatever reason I looked more and more closely at the '40' bit of the '40 years old' legend on the bottle label
...
I said 'James, this isn't a bottle of 40-year-old at all. It's a bottle of 10-year-old that some devious cheapskate scumbag has altered by adding a sort of small upside-down "7" shape to the "1" to make it look like a 4". With a thin black marker pen, by the look of it.' I held the bottle up to the light. 'See?'
...
The point is, until that point we really had thought that what we were drinking was something above and beyond your normal 10-year-old Laphroaig. Just thinking it was old and rare and special helped make it so in our minds. Either our noses weren't up to the job in the first place, or our brains were were ignoring what our noses were telling us. Either way, a humbling, salutary experience. I never liked to ask whether James mentioned all this to whatever so-called friend had set out to hoodwink him, but I think a stern talking-to would have been in order.


Mind you if it had been a really rough bottle of something cheap they would have liked it less - perhaps!

Edit: having said all that, the machine in the advert is a disgracefully cynical con that I wish I'd thought of ;)

[Cuddles]

Actually, the filtering was through activated charcoal, which is pretty much the same stuff lining the barrels that alcohol is usually aged in- it absorbs the fusel oils, esters and other nasties that give the cheap vodka its flavour. (Of course, the barrels also have charred wood from which the alcohol can absorb flavours, but that's another process.)

Water filters work quite well as well. You're not going to turn cheap vodka into expensive vodka, but you can certainly make it taste better.

I wouldn't recommend doing that to scotch or anything else that is supposed to have complex flavours, since the charcoal will strip it out. (Feel free to test this- I'm not going to.)

Yeah, I don't imagine filtering wine is such a good idea.

I would argue that filtering whiskey is a great idea though. Anything that gets rid of the taste must be good.:)

[ponderingturtle]

Another point to consider is that if this actually worked, cheap wine would already taste like fine vintages because wine makers would have discovered it decades ago and they'd be using it on every bottle of wine they ship.

Respectfully,
Myriad

Well there was that experiment that used MRI's to see peoples reactions to drinking a wine. When told it cost $90 it had a very different effect on how their brain responded to drinking it than when told it cost $10.

So you can make a wine better by simply raising the cost.

[ponderingturtle]

Water filters work quite well as well. You're not going to turn cheap vodka into expensive vodka, but you can certainly make it taste better.



Yeah, I don't imagine filtering wine is such a good idea.

I would argue that filtering whiskey is a great idea though. Anything that gets rid of the taste must be good.:)

Tennessee whiskey is filtered through charcoal though, before it goes into the barrels.

[Madalch]

Water filters work quite well as well. You're not going to turn cheap vodka into expensive vodka, but you can certainly make it taste better.
Water filters contain active charcoal, which is why they work.

Yeah, I don't imagine filtering wine is such a good idea.

Actually, nearly all commercial wine (and a heck of a lot of homemade wine) gets filtered before its bottled. It's just NOT filtered through charcoal; they usually use cellulose pads. This removes the sediment and suspended yeast, giving very clear wine.

Filtration units for home winemakers are so common these days that judges in winemaking competitions have been known to state that they will flat out refuse to taste any wine that is not perfectly clear.

[Kittyclaws]

This is sort of off topic, but Mythbusters tested the myth that you could create good vodka by filtering cheap vodka six times. Kari couldn't tell the good stuff from the bad stuff, Jaime was mostly right, and the professional vodka taster was able to perfectly arrange them from unfiltered cheap vodka, to vodka filtered once, twice, etc. to high-end vodka.

And Penn & Teller did a BS episode touting expensive, specialty bottled waters in a nice restaurant, meanwhile filling allthe various bottles from the garden hose out back. No one could tell the difference.

[Ririon]

Ultrasonic? That's not natural? Sounds scientific and industrial to me. Would YOU drink the "frankenwine"? Do we REALLY know the long-term effects of drinking ultrasonic wine? <Insert text from warning labels on ultrasonic equipment> :p