While there's nothing mathematical about this bit of silly woo, I couldn't resist mocking it. There's a Japanese inventor who claims to have created a device that instantly ages wine through a magical homeopathic-sounding process of magically restructuring water molecules.
For why I can't resist... Well, you see, I'm a
bit of a wine nut, and I'm particularly passionate about one very special wine: vintage Port. The problem with vintage Port is that it's pretty close to undrinkable when it's young; it needs to sit and age for at least a decade; 20 to 30 years is better for a really good one. Buying it aged for that long is very expensive (I've paid as much as $210 for a particularly good bottle of 1970 port that I used for my Y2K New Years Eve party); and waiting for it to age in the basement is both frustrating and tricky. (If it gets too warm, it can be ruined; if it gets too damp, the cork can rot and ruin it; if it gets too dry, the cork can shrink and ruin it.) So anything that could *really* accelerate the ageing process without wrecking the wine is something that I would really love to see.
There are two links for this. First, [a short NYT piece](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section4.t-8.html?_r=2&ore…):
>As liquor ages, Tanaka explains, the water molecules slowly rearrange themselves more closely around
>the alcohol molecules, giving the alcohol its distinctive mature taste. Tanaka puts that process into
>overdrive. He pours the wine into a 70-pound container outfitted with an electrolysis chamber. A
>few-second electrical zap gives the wine a slight charge, which breaks up the water molecules and
>allows them to blend more completely with the alcohol. Voilà : Instantly-aged pinot noir, "smoother and
>more mellow than before," Tanaka's American partner, Edward Alexander, claims.
Pure bullshit. In wine, what you're going for in the aging process is breaking down tannins. Tannins are
a compound that come primarily from the skins in red wines. When you drink a young red wine, and there's a bitterish bite, and a sensation that the wine is drying your mouth, that's coming from the tannins. Over time, some the tannins are decomposed, and settle out of the wine as sediments in the bottle. The end result is that there's less of the hard biting tannin, and you can taste the wine. The big tradeoff is that the parts of the grape that give a red wine the most flavor are the same parts that contribute the tannins. So most good red wines are very tannic when young, and they need to be
aged for a while to allow enough of the tannins to break and settle.
As always, though, there's some tradeoff. The organic chemicals that can give wine a fruity flavor
also break down as the wine ages. So if you like the fruity flavor of a wine like a good red Zinfandel (note the **red** in that statement!), you have to drink it young. The usual trick for that is to open the wine, and "let it breathe" - that is, let it sit open to the air for a while. The oxidation process that happens when you expose wine to air will start to break down the tannins, so that the wine will be less harsh.
None of this is magic; none of it has anything to do with any homeopathy-like woo about clustering water molecules around alchohol. It's relatively simple organic chemistry.
So guess what these guys have done? They've invented a machine that bubbles the wine through a bunch of hoses with some air and passes electricity through it. The important part is "bubbles through a bunch of hoses with some air". They're just doing a quicker version of the "letting it breathe" thing, and attaching some silly woo to explain why you need their fancy expensive machine to do it.
Anyway - here's the *real* prize. They did a [promotional *cartoon* about their gadget,][cartoon] complete with
woo-babble about charging water with "positive electricity" and wine (I think they meant alchohol) with "negative electricity" in order to make the water be attracted to and cluster around the alchohol.
[cartoon]: http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/ads/2006/12/11/wine/index.html
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One would think that oneologists would be looking for enzymes in nature that break down tannins. Brew up a bunch of tailored yeast to produce the enzyme, and then figure out where to introduce it into the fermentation/aging process for best effect.
Do you know of any research along these lines?
Fascinating. I wonder if they sincerely believe in their own woo, or whether they are self-conscious huckster types...
One problem I forsee is that tannins are natural antioxidants. If tannins are digested more quickly, then the wine would have very a very short shelf life and would be well on its way to becoming vinegar.
While we're on the subject of organic chemistry, the only things you could make with alcohol and water is hydrogen bonds, unless you oxidize the alcohol. But you wouldn't want that, since you either get acetaldehyde (poison, in high doses) or acetic acid (vinegar)...
Upon second thought, if what they are doing really works, it must be because they're oxidizing the tannins themselves. I wonder what voltages they are using...
Craig:
My understanding is that the basic process is pretty well understood, but that it's a very slow reaction, and that anything that you can do to speed it up would speed up other reactions even more. (Frex, heat makes wine age much faster, but it also tends to ruin the wine, because *other* reactions
go even faster.)
I almost hate to get this started, but it is useful in demolishing the "woo" to realize that water is NOT simply H2O, but rather a dynamic network of H2O, H+, OH-, H3O+, H2O2, and many other ions and molecules.
There was a fight for over a year about whether water was more chains of tetrahedra or loops or something else. That started with high precision measurements of proteins in water, which stayed weird when the proteins were eliminated and pure water tested. The conclusions were in PNAS, and other journals.
There are unsolved combinatorial problems of packing tetrahedra in 3-space, since they don't neatly tessellate. I've had some minor publications on the subject, which is relvant to organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, metallurgy, and other fields.
Google "tetrahelix" to find Buckminster Fuller's take on the matter. And ask me for more, if it matters to you, mathematically.
I am carefully not mentioning the woo-ity of the notion that water has "memory" and the pseudoscience that clings to this...
Turning to Theochemistry, Creationists would probably say that Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana. There's some scholarly dispute about whose wedding. Some say it was the wedding of Jesus and Mary Magdelene. Rabbis in that time and place were almost always married. Especially rabbis who'd done the equivalent of postdoctoral studies, as Jesus did with the Essenes. If he weren't married, that would have been notable, i.e. would have been recorded. Since it wasn't, we can reasonably infer that he was married. In any case, turning water to wine certainly saves on the catering bill.
When I read that title I just naturally interpreted it as "silly sine woo" and got really confused when I started reading about "aging sines"... ;-)
aging of wine does NOT equal to tannin degradation. red wine lovers say that red wine with no tannin is not red wine. i'm actually a white wine lover, so i let it to them.
but aging is a more complex effect. for one, the wine gets some flavours from the wood. but there is one more important thing: micro oxidation. wine contains esters. esters are the flavours, specific esters causes apple, strawberry, cinnamon, walnut or other tastes. during oxidation, some esters are destroyed, others created, so the "ester-portfolio" of the wine changes with time. of course, this oxidation must be minimal, otherwise the wine dies. there are young wines, with no or minimal oxidation. the taste is more fruity, more fresh, more light. barrel-fermented and aged wines loose their fruity taste, and pick up some others. they are called mature wines.
of course, the configuration of water molecules is an ridiculous nonsense.
since they are using electrolysis equipment, couldn't it be simply that they are releasing O2 into the wine to oxidize the tannins faster than just bubbling the wine through air?
Astronautical Engineering Professor Geoffrey Landis at MIT emailed me this correction:
"There's been a lot of speculation that the wedding at Cana was in fact Jesus' wedding, and there's speculation that Jesus married Mary Magdelene, but the two speculations are usually separate, since the nominal first time Jesus meets Mary Magdelene is after the wedding at Cana."
He doesn't say anything about water, wine, or tetrahedra here, however...
In the ongoing battle for King of the Geeks, and Science Bloggers, one might be impressed by the range of accomplishments described at the home page of Geoffrey A. Landis, scientist and science fiction writer.
http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis
Hold on, doubters... not only am I now drinking an excellent "vintage" 2005, but the pleasant glow it creates really helps me pick up on the added nuances that my monster stereo cables bring out.
:)
The chemistry side of this is really interesting. Hm.
The NYT is supposed to be a respectable newspaper. Maybe someone who understands this stuff should write in a letter correcting the poor science in this article and explaining how the machine most likely actually works?
QrazyQat, that was eeevil. Wicked evil. I love it!
Mark, I hadn't known you were such a fan of port. Once I get back to drinking again, I look forward to sharing some good vintage stuff with you.
Uh, and yes, this device is pure, unadulterated woo.
Abel:
Port is practically a reason for living! I adore the stuff.
It's actually funny how I discovered it. My wife is a huge fan of white dessert wines, particularly canadian ice wines. For our 5th anniversary, I went to my local wine store, and told the owner that I wanted to buy two bottles of amazing dessert wine: one that was ready to drink right away, and one that would be ready to drink on our 5th anniversary. This was in 1999; when he realized that we were married in 1994, his eyes lit up, and he said "Have you every tried port? I'm not letting you leave without a bottle; 1994 was one of the best vintages for Port in the last century!"
I ended up leaving with a bottle of Warre 1994, a bottle of Sauterne, and a bottle of an Austrian dessert Reisling. Since we had the port sitting in the basement, I had to find out what it tasted like, so next we went to a good restaurant, I ordered a glass for dessert. $35 for one glass of wine, I thought it was insane, but tried it. And I haven't looked back since. There is *nothing* in the world with flavors like port.
I'm currently slowly working my way through a bottle of 40 year old Tawny port. I'm not generally a fan of Tawny, but the really old Tawny's - the 40 or 60 year varieties - can be really amazing. Flavor like a mixture of lemons, hazlenuts, and caramel.
is vintage port much different in character than the standard everyday stuff you can find most everywhere ?
i ask because i really don't like that other stuff, except as a base for sauce to put on meat.
Cleek:
It's about as different as you could possible imagine :-)
The "standard everyday stuff" is called ruby port. It's cheap, very sweet, very fruity. But not very good, at all.
Here's the story:
In the regions of Portugal where port is produced, they grow grapes on hillside terraces. The vines are all mixed - multiple kinds of grapes; in fact, no one even really knows *which* varieties are the source of most of the vines in the vineyards.
All of the grapes from multiple vineyards are gathered together at harvest time, and they're pressed the old fashioned way - by feet. After it's fermented for a while, they interrupt the fermentations by adding raw brandy until the alchohol level is high enough to kill all of the yeasts.
If the result is extraordinarily good, then they declare a vintage. When they do that, the very best portions of the wine are moved into oak barrels for a year, and then bottled as vintage port. Vintage port is incredibly
intense, more tannic than any other wine I've ever seen, not as sweet as ruby, and truly amazing. It's hard
to describe, other than to say intense and amazing. A vintage is generally declared somewhere between once every three years and once every seven years. If you want to taste one, if you can find it in a restaurant, 1977 is the best of what's ready to drink now. 1980 wasn't nearly so good. 1970 is pretty terrific, but not quite up there with '77. There were a bunch of fantastic vintages in the '90s; '94 was supposedly one of the best of the last century, '97 was almost as good, but they won't be ready to drink for *at least* another decade.
The leftovers, the stuff that either wasn't part of a declared vintage, or the stuff that wasn't good enough to go into the vintage barrels, that stuff is either bottled right up, with pretty much no barrel time, or else it's left in the barrel for a very long time.
The stuff that's just bottled without any aging in a barrel is ruby port - the common everyday stuff.
The rest of the non-vintage stuff is left in barrels for a
long time - at least 5 years, generally a *lot* longer than
that. After sitting in the barrels for that long, it changes
quite dramatically, it turns from red to a sort of golden brown. They make a blend of different years long-aged port, which is called tawny port. The cheapest tawny is a blend that consists of ports that have been aging for at least 10 years - thus, it's called 10 year tawny. They also make blends averaging twenty, thirty, forty, sixty years, sometimes even more. The stuff that's been sitting in the barrel for that long acquires some of the most amazing flavors. Personally, I don't like 10 or 20 year tawnys; less than 30 just doesn't do it for me. 40 year tawny is amazing stuff. A guy I know at Zachy's, a wonderful wine store in Scarsdale, NY has had 80 year tawny. I've never seen the stuff - it's not sold commercially.
If you want to get a sense of what vintage port is like without paying an arm and a leg, look for something called "late bottled vintage", aka "LBV" port. LBVs are treated almost like a vintage, except that the grapes weren't good enough to be declared, and they're left in the barrel for a bit longer to take the edge off the tannins, so that they'll be ready to drink shortly after they're bottled. Osborne produces an excellent LBV that generally sells for around $20/bottle.