How to make cheap wine taste like a fine vintage

I just presented this thread with a similar product and the relevant info. I also gave the link so you could see a picture of it. That was it. geez I am sorry! I was adding info on the topic at hand. I can't believe it. I have nothing to do with Norther brewer other than buying stuff from them. I would not waste my money on such a product either ---- Just knew it was out there. Man - Lighten up.

Thank you Howie for the support. I meant nothing wrong at all. Just giving you people all the relevant info re: the said item which seemed to promise to do the same thing or a similar thing. I guess I should bow out of such a forum if I get accused of spamming and selling when I was innocently just posting a relevant concept/item to the said topic.

Thank you for the short term participation. Farewell! esp. Ian!

Norman
As I said - I owe you an apology.
You posted it innocently, however it read like advertising. It's good in such situations to give that context (e.g. "No connections, but here are similar claims by another company"). That way we know what are your words and what are those of the manufacturers. As you didn't give the context, it appeared these were your words.

I hope you'll accept this apology and understand how the misinterpretation occurred.

regards

Ian

[Robin Garr]

Howie, I'm sorry that this train wreck occurred, and it appears that we've run Norman off.

Would you kindly do us a favor and try to persuade him to give us one more shot. It was a misunderstanding for sure, but I hate to see him leave us over it. Would you tell him that we're sorry and would love to deal him another hand?

Ian,
I've been communicating with Norman here and on a home winemaking website also, for quite some time. In fact, I led him here and he has participated in a few of our Chat sessions. I can assure you that he is not in that business. His business is training dogs for K-9 police forces. He grew up near me. He is also planting a small vineyard in Tennessee and makes wine. The website linked is to an online supplier for home winemaking products, which is not the manufacturer of the product. I think he followed the thread and was not aware such things had been discussed here before and was showing us a different product making the same claims. He's not a spammer.

Norman, all you had to do in your original post was to add a few personal observations, such as "I use this product and think it works", or "I think this is a load of snake oil" (I would think the latter), and all would have been fine.

Daniel and Robin are propounding their own views and I can not see that they are attacking you personally. You were given an unreserved apology by Ian so all should be fine now. IMHO. Please keep posting.

Norman.....

Just to be clear, my comments were directed not at you at all but at the product's claim that the results are uncontested.

Best
Rogov

Interesting that the universal effect is to make bad wine taste good.

To be fair to the authors of the paper that started this thread off, that is not a claim they make. They say that the mangitude of the changes that take place, and whether they are beneficial or not, depend on the intensity of the field and the length of the treatment.

Funny thread.... I understood Norman's post right away and was thinking of half a dozen other products that could have been mentioned. A bit of humor......

This post, however,

"We should form a guild. Like you, I am convinced that the "discovery" of corked wines became an upper-level intellectual sport and that it all started with on the Squire/Parker bulletin board. Indeed, the more quickly one could "spot" a corked wine the more respect one earned respect from his/her board peers.

Not to say that cork is not responsible for some wine failure. Not, however, in the outrageous quantities some propose."

is interesting. This is quite the jab at another board.

Why anybody would earn respect for spotting a corked wine is beyond me. If a wine is corked, it is corked. Sure there are varying degrees of corked, but anyway you look at it, it is still corked.

I don't know what you consider outrageous, but from my experience, anywhere from 4 - 7% are corked. Some, so minutely, it takes a day for the cork taint to show. But either way, the wine is corked - and is not what is supposed to be represented.

Why would anyone want to accept this failure rate? Even if you don't believe the rate is that high, (which it is) why would anyone want to accept a failure rate of 1% or even less.

I could keep going, but why?

mark

man - don't you still understand - view the link - the text is taken from THEIR website - Not Me!!!

21 posts and blackjack for me.

what a way to go out!

best wishes to you all - or most of you!

:-0

Norman,

For what it is worth, I have gotten similar reactions to my posts on this forum, which I had considered to be controversial, but not fodder for outrage. There is a wide psychology of behavior among people and WLDG is big enough to capture a representative sampling of most of behavioral types, save those really base types that you might normally associate with stupid people. You almost never see really base behavior among wine aficionados, which is one of the aspects of this forum that draws me back.

Don’t let the behavior of a vocal individual or two, out of thousands, blow you out. Robin has disinclined advertising on his forum, so some folks (not saying this is necessarily the case with Ian, I don’t know him) are going to feel emboldened to scold what they perceive as advertising, like dutiful soldiers, until told by Robin that everything is okay. And I would bet at least 90% of people reading your post would have thought about the possibility of such improvement, albeit it skeptically, probably, rather than harbor any thoughts about any impropriety on your part.

I didn’t personally care about the idea because I figured maybe you could reduce harshness by screwing around with a tough wine, but I wouldn’t think you could improve terroir expression, fruit expression or class, which would matter more to me. But I certainly didn’t feel ill about anything you said. And I thought you handled yourself in a classy way after the tempest in a teapot. So I personally hope you stick around.

Covert

The Perfect Sommelier

It sounds unbelievable, but the fact that it works is undisputed by critics and wine makers.

Norman,

I'm afraid that you unknowingly stepped on a hornet's nest here. Some time ago, we had the inventor of one of these magnetic wine improvement products (it might even have been this one) on this board touting his wares. There was a long, drawn-out argument concerning the efficacy of these products. I think this is why Ian and others have acted so negatively to your posting.

Regarding magnetic wine enhancement devices: "the fact that it works" is not a fact at all, but a claim that is not supported either by scientific theory or by any scientifically acceptable controlled experimental evidence. Yes, there are anecdotal testimonials, some even from prominent wine critics and winemakers. But I suggest that you google "placebo effect" and read up on it before you accept such as evidence of efficacy.

Modern theoretical chemistry and physics says that these devices have no effect whatsoever of the wine. There are a couple of centuries' worth of practical experimentation to back up the theory that says these devices shouldn't work. Things can work without our really knowing why. For example, aspirin was in use for over a century before we finally figured out just how it works to reduce fever.

So maybe these magnetic things do work, through some process we haven't figured out yet. But that's not what the manufacturers are claiming. They provide an explanation that scientifically just isn't valid. But let's set that aside for a moment. Given that we don't know how these magnetic wine enhancers work, and that science as we know it says they shouldn't work, it's incumbent on the manufacturers to provide solid experimental evidence (i.e., properly controlled double-blind studies) to demonstrate that they do work.

-Paul W.

Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

Last post for real:

I just wanted to thank those of you for your apologies and also those of you who supported my post. I apologize for the lack of clarity, but i was presenting info from the specified and included link to document the source (for academics out there). Not to open a can of worms. NO - i do not use or support that product. Just saw it and the thread reminded me of it ( I have a good Mind) and noted it in the post. It was innocent in the intention. I owed it to you people who apologized or had empathy for my post. Hence this last post.

As I told Robin in a P.M. - I am not going to hang around here anymore. I have too much in my life and my business, and my health issues, and a serious organic garden and orchard and now vineyard to deal with. I now bow out gracefully! Thank you all!

Best wishes to you and have a great Holidays and a special bottle for the new year and a terribly rough old year!

Norman

This thread is mostly way off the subject of the provocative New Scientist article that started it. If you don't object, I'll return to that. I've watched (sometimes debunked) pseudotechnical gimmicks for wine and other things longer than most of you. (I contributed to the gimmicks summary in the FAQ file for alt.food.wine, section 9). I believe it's a mistake to immediately group this new report with the commercial hustles that appear as regularly as night follows day.

First it's New Scientist, not a yuppie wine-accessory catalog, and the article mentions other, less creditable gimmicks. It describes wine-industry use of electrochemical methods to remove harshness from young wine. (Writer's remark about all wines needing six months to be drinkable comes presumably from someone inexperienced with things like Austrian Prälatenwein and Beaujolais "Nouveau," though latter example might be controversial ). I've added a compressed link to the same article, below.

http://tinyurl.com/3hawzf

Finally Mr. Rogov and others, I gather that your assertions about claims of cork-fault prevalence, and their basis, come from sources unrelated to mine. That should be a separate thread, but since it's here, FYI: The mostly trade people, with some winemakers and writers, whom I taste with in three San Francisco area blind-tasting groups (average serious wine-tasting experience at least 25 years) certainly include many people you would respect and some you may know or know of. We track percentages of TCA-contaminated bottles found (and generally there is strong consensus, blind, about TCA contamination, Brett, etc., though we have sent out samples for laboratory 2-stage mass-spec verification in controversial cases). Some years ago there was a disturbing rise in the rate of TCA contamination in the bottles we opened. Understand, this reflects not a cross-section of the wine industry, but rather the wines the groups were following, the plurality being Burgundies and German Rieslings, with a minority from other regions. We found circa 5-6% legitimate TCA fault earlier this decade, which also seems to've dropped off considerably in more recent years. Of course, our sample (of perhaps 5000 wines in the interval) could be a statistical fluke, but it mirrored simultaneous complaints by professionals in various countries. None of this had any connection with Parker or any other pundits or Web sites, though I can guess that with so many people seeing a problem, it may have been discussed there too.

My casual observation of wine service in US restaurants, and in shops that offer tasting, has been that cork fault is under-identified in those places. Whether servers and customers were unconscious of the issue (which I've also seen), or businesses didn't want to bear the cost of bad bottles, I can't say. And of course, as one of the UC-Davis food science professors remarked online years ago, part of the population just can't smell TCA, including him and some of his colleagues.

Last post for real:

I just wanted to thank those of you for your apologies and also those of you who supported my post. I apologize for the lack of clarity, but i was presenting info from the specified and included link to document the source (for academics out there). Not to open a can of worms. NO - i do not use or support that product. Just saw it and the thread reminded me of it ( I have a good Mind) and noted it in the post. It was innocent in the intention. I owed it to you people who apologized or had empathy for my post. Hence this last post.

As I told Robin in a P.M. - I am not going to hang around here anymore. I have too much in my life and my business, and my health issues, and a serious organic garden and orchard and now vineyard to deal with. I now bow out gracefully! Thank you all!

Best wishes to you and have a great Holidays and a special bottle for the new year and a terribly rough old year!

Norman

Norman
All the best for work and health - I hope 2009 brings better in both.
regards
Ian

I'm sorry that Norman felt he needed to leave, but understand how his original post seemed like it could be stealth marketing.

My personal TCA detection rate is about 3-4%, but I know I am not the most sensitive. There are others who I know have a lower threshold, and it's not uncommon for me to think a wine is a bit flat and then someone more sensitive spot TCA (and then often I get a light whiff when I go searching= I'm don't think it's deluding myself, I can be pretty vocal when I don't get any TCA). Many studies have shown the variation in TCA sensitivity, and it has nothing to do with one's other abilities as a taster. I've known highly TCA sensitive people who I felt weren't useful to me for notes otherwise, I know two excellent tasters (one professional) who cheerfully admit they are in the middle of the scale. And one friend whose Bordeaux tastes I trust cheerfully admits he is almost totally insensitive.

Back to original topic- The original article was a bit unclear. It sounds to me that this process is being looked at as a way to bring wine to market sooner (without using carbonic maceration). Is it being applied before or after malo for reds? Not clear to me. It doesn't seem that the actual researchers are claiming that it mimics the process of cellaring, though the article goes off in that direction a couple times. I'm hoping Mark Lipton will read and example to those of us who chosr to take the science for non-science majors options in our college educations.

Tom, Hi....We should form a guild. Like you, I am convinced that the "discovery" of corked wines became an upper-level intellectual sport and that it all started with on the Squire/Parker bulletin board. Indeed, the more quickly one could "spot" a corked wine the more respect one earned respect from his/her board peers.

I think that Daniel knows that I certainly agree. I figure 90% to 95% of the modern world is poisoned and trashed by the trappings of technocracy. It’s a pleasure to give up 5% to be at peace with something Old World 95% of the time.

Well said, Covert

CHEERS!
ART

Sorry to hear Norman is leaving. Good luck with your vines and your wines! Enjoy the Holidays and Happy New Year!

Being an amateur winemaker I look at all this quite differently than others. As others have suggested, these so called “gadgets” or “devices” if for some reason they can somehow introduce “energy“ to the “system” so that existing substances in the “system” can interact; or introduce a substance (copper penny or wine wand) that can react with an existing substance already in the “system” a chemical change in the “system” is possible.
This is an example of people asking- How? Why? and When? - when it comes to trying to understand why a wine smells and taste the way it does or how a wine bottle ages.

Salute

Interesting that the universal effect is to make bad wine taste good.

To be fair to the authors of the paper that started this thread off, that is not a claim they make. They say that the mangitude of the changes that take place, and whether they are beneficial or not, depend on the intensity of the field and the length of the treatment.

Well, the gist of the article is that the process, when applied judiciously, will improve the wine based on the tasting panel's results. 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!

I'm approaching this from someone with training in physics and chemistry and find it hard to believe that 3 min. exposure to a 600V/cm AC field will yield the chemical changes that would be needed. I tried to look at some details of the work by the Chinese scientists, but everything beyond the abstract is behind a paywall. I fear there may be major flaws in their experimental design and implementation. The New Scientist writer could have been a bit more skeptical....

Going back to the original posting:

A high intensity electric field certainly is theoretically capable of causing chemical changes. Did the perform a chemical analysis of the wine both before and after the treatment, to find out just what changed?

It's at present not a particularly practical method--not many wine enthusiasts own large tesla coils.

-Paul W.

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!

That always amuses me, too. How come magnets, pyramids, etc don't cause brett blooms, harder tannins, or fading fruit!

That always amuses me, too. How come magnets, pyramids, etc don't cause brett blooms, harder tannins, or fading fruit!

Yes, but let us keep in mind that some pyramids will keep your razor blades sharpened forever. I've seen the pyramids in Egypt. I have a feeling that buying new razor blades might be less expensive than building one of those! Aside from which, when crossing the River Styx, I'd rather have a good bottle of Chateau d'Yquem to keep me company than a sharp razor blade.

Ye amused curmudgeon
Rogov

Did the perform a chemical analysis of the wine both before and after the treatment, to find out just what changed?

They identified certain changes by chemical analysis, yes

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!

That always amuses me, too. How come magnets, pyramids, etc don't cause brett blooms, harder tannins, or fading fruit!

Well these guys found "Burning, disharmonious mouthfeel with unpleasant scent" for one of their treatments. Is that good enough? Er, bad enough.

Somehow I think a technique that succeeds ONLY in destroying wine would not stand much chance of publication.

To me it sounds like another “cooking” experiment. In the article Howie posted it says -“The food industry has experimented with electric fields as an alternative to heat-treating since the 1980s, and 10 years ago Xin An Zeng, a chemist at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, decided to see what he could do for wine”.

Salute

They identified certain changes by chemical analysis, yes

What were they? Were they the same sorts of chemical changes that occur during normal wine aging?

Has this technique been subjected to double-blind controlled experimentation?

-Paul W.

They identified certain changes by chemical analysis, yes

What were they? Were they the same sorts of chemical changes that occur during normal wine aging?

They analysed for many different chemicals. The abstract (linked to in the New Scientist article) gives a clue as to the range. I don't know how the changes compare to those in normal aging - and the authors tdo not make that claim, depsite the waffle about aging in the paper.

Has this technique been subjected to double-blind controlled experimentation?

The tastings were blind. They did not go into detail, so I do not know if they were double-blind by your definition, but I would doubt the "double" bit is important in this context.