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I HAVE used my carbon steel knife to cut up all kinds of meats and vegetables, but I had never thought of using it to prepare wine. Not until a couple of weeks ago, when I dunked the tip of it into glasses of several reds and whites, sometimes alone, sometimes with a sterling silver spoon, a gold ring or a well-scrubbed penny. My electrical multimeter showed that these metals were stimulating the wines with a good tenth of a volt. I tingled with anticipation every time I took a sip. My foray into altering wine flavor with knives and pennies ended in failure. But it was one small part of a fruitful inquiry in which I learned new ways to get rid of unwanted aromas, including the taint of corked wine, and what aeration can really do for wine flavor. |
The Wine Wand is a hollow glass tube that has a large cut-glass knob at one end and contains a rattling handful of pierced faceted balls that look like costume jewelry beads. A small wand for use in a wineglass sells for $325, with a travel case. A larger version that fits in a bottle is $525, with case.
The promotional literature explains that the wand speeds aeration by means of “permanently embedded frequencies, one of them being oxygen.”
This sounds like pseudoscience, and I couldn’t imagine how a glass tube could alter the aeration of wine, apart from dragging in some air as it is inserted into the bottle or glass. Yet when I and two dinner companions compared glasses of a red and a white wine with and without the Wine Wand, we found some differences.
I soon discovered that the wand is one of several wine-enhancement devices marketed to drinkers who can’t wait for their wines to taste their best. But it doesn’t come with the weirdest explanation. That distinction belongs to a bottle collar that claims to modify a wine’s tannins. With magnets.
A couple of wine enhancement devices simply aerate wine, just as sloshing it around in the bottle or glass would. There is a battery-powered frother, and a small glass channel that adds turbulence and air bubbles as the wine flows through it from the bottle into the glass.
More intriguing was something called the Clef du Vin, or “key to wine,” a patented French product sold in several sizes, starting with a pocket size that costs about $100. It consists of a quarter-inch disc of copper alloyed with small amounts of silver and gold, embedded in a thin stainless-steel plate. The user is directed to dip the disc briefly into a glass of wine. A dip lasting one second is said to have the same effect as one year of cellar aging.
Copper, silver and gold are all known to react directly with the sulfur compounds found in wine. Copper (and the iron in my knife) also catalyzes the reaction of oxygen with many molecules. Slow oxidation in the bottle is known to cause the tannins in aged red wines to become less astringent, and it’s widely believed that aerating a young red, for example by decanting it, promotes rapid oxidation and softens its tannins.
Maybe this Clef was something more than a gimmick.
To help me evaluate the Wand, the Clef and the whole idea of enhancing freshly opened wine, I called on two friends, Andrew Waterhouse and Darrell Corti. Mr. Waterhouse is a professor of wine chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and a specialist in oxidation reactions and phenolic substances, including tannins. Mr. Corti is the proprietor of Corti Brothers grocery in Sacramento, one of the most influential wine retailers in California, and a recent inductee into the Vintners Hall of Fame.
We met at Mr. Corti’s house for an afternoon of taste tests, lunch and discussion. Some tests were blind, others open-eyed. By the end, we had indeed detected some differences between carafes and glasses of wine that were treated with the Wand or the Clef, and the wines that were left alone. The differences were not great, and not always in favor of the treated wine, which usually seemed to be missing something.
Mr. Corti said: “There do seem to be differences. The question is, are they important differences? You could buy a lot of good wine for the price of that wand.”
He also pointed out that the Clef is a very expensive version of the copper pennies that home vintners have long dipped into wine to remove the cooked-egg smell of excess hydrogen sulfide.
Mr. Waterhouse thought the elimination of sulfur aromas is all that these accessories — or, for that matter, aeration — had to offer.
“A number of sulfur compounds are present in wine in traces and have an impact on flavor because they’re very potent,” he said. “Some are unpleasant and some contribute to a wine’s complexity. You can certainly dispose of these in five minutes with a little oxygen and a small area of metal catalyst to speed the reactions up, and change your impression of the wine.”
But Mr. Waterhouse maintained that no brief treatment could convert the tannins to less astringent, softer forms, not even an hour in a decanter.
“You can saturate a wine with oxygen by sloshing it into a decanter, but then the oxygen just sits there,” he said. “It reacts very slowly. To change the tannins perceptibly in an hour, you would have to hit the wine with pure oxygen, high pressure and temperature, and powdered iron with a huge catalytic surface area.”
So why do people think decanting softens a wine’s astringency?
“I think that this impression of softening comes from the loss of the unpleasant sulfur compounds, which reduces our overall perception of harshness,” Mr. Waterhouse said.
With devices debunked and aeration unmasked as simple subtraction, the conversation turned to genuinely useful tips for handling wine.
Mr. Waterhouse said that the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine, which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap.
“It’s kind of messy, but very effective in just a few minutes,” he said. “The culprit molecule in infected corks, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is chemically similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic.”
He also counseled a relaxed approach to wine storage, which he adopted in the 1980s after moving from California to Louisiana and back.
Mr. Waterhouse had a small collection of fine wines that he kept for a few years in a New Orleans closet with no temperature control. When it came time to return to California, he thought there was no point in shipping wines that had probably been spoiled in the southern heat. So he started opening them.
“There was one bottle, I think a Concannon cabernet, that was absolutely spectacular,” he recalled. “A lot of that wine had sat in our accelerated aging system and reached perfection.
“So there’s no single optimal temperature for aging wines. I’d tell people who don’t keep wine for decades to forget about cellar temperatures. Take those big reds and put them on top of the refrigerator, the most heat-abusive place you can find, and in three years they’ll probably be at their peak.”
Mr. Corti agreed.
“Wine is like a baby,” he said. “It’s a lot hardier than people give it credit for.”
January 14, 2009
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