Ultrasound Machine Ages Wine

Inventor Casey Jones says his creation uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. Mr. Jones said, "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage tasting like it costs hundreds. It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt." The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like a Dr. Who ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker. I know a certain special lady who is about to have the best bottle of Boone's Farm in the world.

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My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.

As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).

Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".

When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.

These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.

If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.

Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those

Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.

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ouch said:

You've got to be kidding me.

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Ultrasonic Treatment with Gas Purging as a Quick Aging Treatment for Wine

V. L. Singleton 1 and Diana E. Draper 1

1 Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis.

Previous generally favorable but conflicting reports of the effectiveness of quick aging treatments with ultrasound have been clarified by further experiments. Detailed sensory and chemical analyses are reported on five types of wine treated with hydrogen peroxide and with nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, air, and oxygen, alone and combined with ultrasound. Definite effects were produced, yet the wines could not be considered overtreated. At least under the conditions tested, the effects of ultrasound do not appear promising as a quick means of improving wine quality. Acceleration of oxidation by ultrasound in the presence of air or oxygen was demonstrated. However, in at least some samples, a readily detected odor and flavor difference was produced by the ultrasound treatment in all of the wine types and with every gas. In a majority of cases, this difference was described as a scorched flavor.

Although this special flavor introduced by ultrasound was not highly unpleasant, at least at the levels produced here, overall quality scores were generally slightly lowered, complexity or richness of flavor not appreciably improved, and other factors (such as grape aroma) unfavorably affected by ultrasound.

Hydrogen produced a very low redox potential in wine without also producing bottle bouquet, proving that no direct cause-and-effect relation exists between the two. Otherwise, hydrogen, nitrogen, and (except for solubility) carbon dioxide appeared rather inert toward wine. Air and oxygen produced changes attributable to oxidation. Ultrasound accelerated this oxidation, and, for studying the chemistry of such reactions, may have some uses. Since the flavor changes produced in wine by ultrasound appear to require fairly prolonged treatment, other applications, such as aiding in degassing or facilitating extraction from oak wood, may be worth investigation for possible use in wine processing.

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Inventor Casey Jones says his creation uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. Mr. Jones said,

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