For a Tastier Wine, the Next Trick Involves ...(1)
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.
It all began when a colleague sent me the Wine Wand, a glass device that is said to speed the aeration of a freshly opened wine and bring it to its “peak flavor” in minutes. During his blind tasting, my colleague found that the wand seemed to soften the flavor of several wines almost as well as an hour’s decanting.
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.
