NYTimes: HaroldMacGee On Wine Gizmos..

Interesting read. Definitive comments to follow.
Tom

NYTimes:HaroldMacGee

Finally got a chance to read the article carefully.
1. Biggest guffaw in the article was the efficacy of the WineWand being due to: "permanently embedded frequencies, one of them being oxygen". I always thought oxygen was just an element. Didn't know it could be described by Maxwell's equation. Shows what I know about chemistry and electromagnetic radiation.
2. The article was rather disappointing for a HaroldMacGee article. Pretty shallow & superficial for him and a lot of unanswered (and unasked) questions.
3. OTOH, DrWaterhouse's comments bear paying attention to.
He attributed any effects of aeration to elimination of sulfer aromas. Maybe/maybe not. But he also dismisses any aeration effects by the gizmos as being too brief to affect the tannins and making them softer/less astringent, not even an hour in a decanter will do it.
This is something I've long scorned. The oxidation rate is waaaay too slow to chemically effect the tannins in a period of hrs or even a few days. Oxidation products in wines are a browning of the anthocynanins and precipitation of the pholyphenolics as they polymerize and precipitate out. You you never see these in a wine that's sloshed around in a decanter for an hour.
4. DrWaterhouse pointed out the efficacy of using plastic wrap to remove TCA aromas. Surprised MacGee hadn't heard of that, most of us all know of it. And know that not all plastic wraps work. His technique of pouring the wine into a bowl & covering w/ plastic wrap was a new method, though.
5. Most importantly, DrWaterhouse counseled a relaxed approach to wine storage. And DarrellCorti agrees. That wine is a lot hardier than people give it credit for.
This is something I've long felt true, but seldom expound upon because it precipitates rabid attacks from the crowd that goes apoplectic when their UPS wine delivery is left exposed to 80F temps for a few hrs and the capsules don't spin. But I tend to agree with the two of them.

Anyway...just my thoughts on the article.

Tom

DrWaterhouse pointed out the efficacy of using plastic wrap to remove TCA aromas. Surprised MacGee hadn't heard of that, most of us all know of it. And know that not all plastic wraps work. His technique of pouring the wine into a bowl & covering w/ plastic wrap was a new method, though.

I hesitate to comment after the "definitive" comments, but I didn't read that way. The article said pouring into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap, my understanding was the wine had to be in contact.

I am more relaxed than many on storage. And I've had some great bottles that sat in kitchen cabinets for a long time.
That said, I've had a lot of poorly stored bottles that showed quite poorly. I laugh at those who panic because their cooling system went down, and their cellar temperature rose to 75F for a whole day! But I think that there's a lot of collective experience that shows that warm storage harms wine. I think the comments about sticking wine on top of the fridge for 3 years based on some anecdotal evidence (even if from a professor) are a bit irresponsible. We'll see what the collective opinion is when our April Fools experiment ends.

Finally got a chance to read the article carefully.

3. OTOH, DrWaterhouse's comments bear paying attention to.
He attributed any effects of aeration to elimination of sulfer aromas. Maybe/maybe not. But he also dismisses any aeration effects by the gizmos as being too brief to affect the tannins and making them softer/less astringent, not even an hour in a decanter will do it.

I found this argument less than convincing. One way to polymerize tannins is the oxidative crosslinking of phenols, a chemical reaction that I've actually performed. The way to do it in lab is to use either CuCl2 or FeCl3 as the oxidant. In the latter case, some phenols can be completely crosslinked in a few hours, so even after an hour we'd see 30-40% crosslinking. Now, I'm not saying that tannins in wine are comparable to these reactions, but I don't think that we should dismiss out of hand the possibility of significant oxidative crosslinking, catalyzed by trace metals in the wine or on the surface of some quasi-mystical wine device, even in an hour.

This is something I've long scorned. The oxidation rate is waaaay too slow to chemically effect the tannins in a period of hrs or even a few days. Oxidation products in wines are a browning of the anthocynanins and precipitation of the pholyphenolics as they polymerize and precipitate out. You you never see these in a wine that's sloshed around in a decanter for an hour.

Florida Jim alerted me to an interesting article by Jamie Goode calling into question the long-held belief that tannins increase in size with time. Here it is. I remain unconvinced that the aeration of wine is limited to the oxidation of sulfur compounds, but I also concede that it may not be due to tannin polymerization.

4. DrWaterhouse pointed out the efficacy of using plastic wrap to remove TCA aromas. Surprised MacGee hadn't heard of that, most of us all know of it. And know that not all plastic wraps work. His technique of pouring the wine into a bowl & covering w/ plastic wrap was a new method, though.

One thing that I and several others have noted is that wines treated with plastic wrap seem to lose more than just the TCA. It's likely that some of the more volatile esters may also adsorb fairly well to polyethylene.

5. Most importantly, DrWaterhouse counseled a relaxed approach to wine storage. And DarrellCorti agrees. That wine is a lot hardier than people give it credit for.
This is something I've long felt true, but seldom expound upon because it precipitates rabid attacks from the crowd that goes apoplectic when their UPS wine delivery is left exposed to 80F temps for a few hrs and the capsules don't spin. But I tend to agree with the two of them.

Stay tuned, then, for the ongoing WLDG heat damage trials, in which several of us have committed multiple bottles of wine to a semi-controlled scientific investigation into the effects of non-ideal storage conditions on the organoleptic qualities of wine. That thread is here.

Mark Lipton

There has been lots of talk here over the years about devices purporting to "enhance", "accelerate aging", "soften tannins", etc. Usually, an entrepreneur has made an unsupported claim and the Winelovers have been appropriately skeptical. Much less often has someone in the scientific community evaluated these claims. Here's an NYT article in which a wine chemistry professor at Davis participated in a blind tasting and suggested why such devices might appear to be effective. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/dining/14curi.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=harold%20mcgee&st=cse

See this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21524

[David M. Bueker]

I have merged the threads. Hope nobody minds.