In the course of development of the Water-to-Wine-o’matic, I’ve come across a way to make wine into… better wine! Apologies for the terrible cell phone pictures.
I’ll start with a brief, non-sommelier description of the situation. Actually, I’ll give an ENGINEER’s description: it all starts when grapes are fermented with yeast. While I’m sure there are some optimizations here, it probably can’t be done for cheap. After some more work I don’t care about, the wine is put into bottles with a few target characteristics. Each bottling is designed such that there’s a target time that the wine has is best drinkability because the wine changes over time in the bottle. From what I understand this is very complicated process involve all the chemicals within the bottle; some bottles age much better, and longer, than others.
Can we speed this up? In short, no, not really. However, we can induce a chemical change to improve a wine’s flavor a bit. The target wine should taste a bit young and you’ll need a french press or awesome blender.
Step 1) Pour servings of wine into french press (or blender).
Step 2) Pump french press to froth the wine (or hit the blender on high) for about 20-30 seconds. This isn’t a consistent number between wines, of course.
Step 3) ??? Let the wine chill out and the bubbles to dissipate, I guess.
Step 4) Serve and enjoy!
Whats going on here in both the french press and the blender is the wine is getting hit with a ton more oxygen than just letting it breath in a glass. This induces some chemical changes that remove that new, young taste, giving you a slightly more mature wine. While I’d love to pass some samples through a spectrometer, I can only give a subjective observation based on my taste. It is noticeably not the same wine before the process, and personally I’d prefer it after this hackery. I’m sure some would balk at the though of this man-handling of their booze, but hey, not their kitchen.