Thursday, October 2 2008

Wine for Bats

Ultrasonic wine ager . . . sure it is.

I once had the opportunity to talk to a con man (reformed) as part of a fraud seminar I took when I worked at a bank, and I got to ask him a question that's bugged me my whole life: how do people fall for idiotic scams? When we read about the contortions folks go through to hand over hard-earned cash for a handful of magic beans, we laugh and fee superior--how could they be so dumb?

He told me that it was easy. He never convinced anyone of anything. The trick was to let the marks trick themselves: find someone who wants something too good to be true, and offer it to them. If they're greedy enough to think they can get a better deal than reality can offer, they'll work at glossing over the tatters in the fabric of the con on their own.

And thus it is with magic wine ageing devices. While they come in a lot of varieties, they all have one thing in common: they offer situations too good to be true, and no credible evidence of any kind to back it up. This weeks flavour-of-the-month is the Ultrasonic Wine Ager. According to the inane and credulous article in the UK's Daily Telegraph, the 'inventor', on Casy Jones (he toots his own horn pretty well) says:

Mr Jones, 53, 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.

Well golly, who wouldn't want that? Pay less than a hundred dollar for a case of wine and suddenly turn it into magic wine that would cost over two thousand bucks? Whoa nelly, sign me up and I'll be wringing bar mats out and selling it as cognac! It sounds too good to be true, so tell us Casey, how does your $700 machine work?

. . . the £350 gadget uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle.

Um, wait. Molecules collide all the time, above absolute zero, but that isn't a significant factor in ageing. Ageing is a complex redox reaction of thousands of different compounds in wine and isn't completely understood at this time. One thing that's well understood, however, is how ultrasound works.

Ultrasound refers to sound frequency higher than human beings can normally hear, above 20,000 hertz. Bats use ultrasound for echo-location, making high pitched clicks and squeaks and listening to the echoes bouncing off of surfaces in their environment.

Chateau LaPlasma anyone?

But while ultrasound can clean gunk off of jewelery (which is pretty cool--it does this by inducing sonic cavitation in the liquid the jewelery is immersed in. The little bubbles collapse immediately and the collapse bursts water at the surfaces, nudging dirt and goo off) or determine the health of a fetus in obstetrics, the one thing it absolutely, positively cannot do is interact with molecules. The problem is, the wavelengths of ultrasound are typically around 1 millimitre, a small distance to be sure, but compared to the size of a molecule, it's many orders of magnitude too large to interact with them.

I'm trying to come up with an analogy stupid enough for an accurate comparison. Ah! Using ultrasound to influence alcohol molecules is like trying to kill bacteria by hitting them with your car. Not gonna happen. By the way, can I interest anyone in a 1972 Chevy Nova bacterial sanitising machine?

And yet, if you do a Google search on 'ultrasound wine age machine' you'll get many, many hits. Most of them are from ostensibly responsible technology sites and wine blogs that link directly back to the Telegraph article, cutting and pasting the information. I have a question for the people who compose the content for those sites: do you eat food you find on the ground too? How does it taste? Unfortunately, repeating lies seems to give them more credence in our media saturated age, and while this scam is so stupidly easy to disprove, it's getting enough blogtime that many people will probably buy it--a three hundred fifty UK pounds a pop.

Yep, I'm fully aware that this sounds cynical and grumpy. But I feel a sense of responsibility to wine consumers. I've spent a big chunk of my life learning as much as I could about wine, winemaking and wine technology. I'm grateful for the job I do and the opportunities I've been afforded by this industry and the folks in it. I'd hate to see anyone waste money on such an evil scheme.

Now, about that Nova: 10% off for cash!

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