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&oref=login&oref=slogin):
>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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