Re: Finally a verifiable "aging" gimmick??

There was a lot of rubbish in the introduction to the paper about young wine, and aging in oak.

But later on there were also a number of apparently solid experimental results.... namely that passing wine through an electrical field changes the chemical make-up of the wine (as determined by chemical analysis) and changes the taste (as determined blind by a panel of 12 tasters). There's a long way to go to verify these results, and determine if/how the technique should be used, but it looks interesting to me.

Article is poorly done. But research is possibly interesting. As far as I can tell, it seems the process is about bringing wine to market faster, NOT about mimicking cellaring.

"Steve Slatcher" in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com :

That's basically my take on it also. And as Dale (I think) pointed out, even if sound, the process's value may be purely commercial (like some other technical measures long available to winemakers).

The writer came off naive about wine, making categorical statements many of us might have reason to dispute. (It makes me curious about the larger question: how does a writer report effectively about an unfamiliar complex subject, which many people do have knowledge of, without committing gaffes? A standard option is to have experts review it first, but besides that I think some writers approach these situations more skillfully than others.)

The longer reference is to the New Scientist which is only a science news magazine. The peer review article referred to appears to be in a publisher house journal rather than in a scientific organization journal where most of the best academics publish. Many scientists, and especially many universities, hate many such journals since they often have very high charges for subscriptions and often high page charges for publication in them - in other words they often are out to make the largest profit possible. As for peer review in such journals, that is up to the publishing house and can vary greatly in quality. If anyone wants to read the "peer reviewed" article that gives the details, you must pay the publishing company over US$ 30 to do so. I wonder why the article was not submitted to Nature or Science, since it has general interest. For example these journals have had articles that concerned ancient wine, etc. For example, Science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS) and not a publishing house. It is weekly. It is a cream skimmer and rejects many more articles than it publishes. Peer review is by a few experts in the field and statistics are checked. Even so, a little junk gets through, but not much.

Even if an electric field produces changes as described and may make a young wine more drinkable, it may or may not improve the quality of the wine at the peak. Wine contains thousands of compounds and the distribution of the many micro components varies from wine to wine and will determine quality at peak. There is nothing at all new about making wine more drinkable at an early age. Heat and motion have been used for centuries to produce Madeira. However the eventual quality of the wine is greatly different from that of wines produced by usual methods. Fining harsh, young red wines with egg whites and many other things long has been used to make red wines more drinkable at an early age and to remove excess tannins that could be present even after the wines peak. Taken to the extreme, fining can result in wine that is smooth, but has little interesting character left The results about aging wine with an electric field need to be duplicated, subjected to strict peer review, and results need to be published in top journals of scientific organizations.Until that time I do not consider it very useful to speculate about it. As it is not being sold to the wine drinker, I see no need to consider it.

I liked Joe Moryl's comment on this on another forum: " It always is amusing to me how a process like the one described, which would be very non-specific in its action on individual molecules, winds up modifying exactly those molecules with improve the sensory qualities!"