It’s a Miracle!
Jesus, the Bible tells us, once turned water into wine. And now you can too. At least that’s the promise of The Miracle Machine, a home fermentation device whose inventors claim it can turn water into Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc and more.
You don’t need to be the Son of God, all you need is $499 (for the machine), some water, a few simple ingredients (like yeast, grape concentrate and a “finishing powder” said to mimic the flavors of barrel aging), plus an iPhone app to monitor the progress of your own vinous “miracle” and three days. The result—supposedly—is wine that will rival bottles costing up to $20, all for the blessed cost of only $2.
How this happens, inventors Kevin Boyer and Philip Vine aren’t saying, though the Miracle Machine website states that the gourd-shaped device “uses an array of electrical sensors, transducers, heaters and pumps to provide a controlled environment for the primary and, as needed, secondary fermentation stages.”
No word yet on when and where the Miracle Machine will be sold, though the ingredients necessary to get your miracle up and running will reportedly be sold through Amazon.
Would you like some loaves and fishes with that?
Feed Your Head (With Red Wine)
Okay, so maybe it’s not quite what Grace Slick had in mind when she sang “White Rabbit,” but the health benefits of drinking moderate amounts of red wine have been pretty widely documented. It can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke, work against some kinds of cancer cells, help control high blood pressure, increase longevity and make members of the opposite sex drool at the very sight of you. (Well, the first three, anyway.)
And now researchers have found that a Mediterranean-style diet that includes regular glasses of red wine can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive disfunction by up to seven-and-a-half years. The study was carried out by Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, which tested almost 1,000 older Americans on what is called the “MIND” diet for various brain functions over a five-year period.
One pill may make you larger and one pill may make you small, but red wine can keep your brain working no matter what size you are. (Or what pills you’re taking.)
And while here in the U.S. red wine is helping to improve the function of your brain and heart and immune system, in China a rice-based spirit called “baijiu,” can improve the effectiveness of, ah. . . another body part.
According to the Food and Drug Administration of the Chinese region of Liuzhou, the makers of “Kung Fu Wine Pot of Gold” and “Liu Pa God Health Wine” have been goosing their concoctions with the chemical sildenafil, which we in this country know as Viagra.
No indication whether this news was put out as a warning or an advertisement but it does seem that the effects of a baijiu hangover could be pretty brutal. Not only would you get a headache, cottonmouth and dry heaves but a woody that would last all week.
Ouch.
Price, Social Media Keys to Wine Market Expansion
If wineries want to boost their business and attract younger, tech-savvy new consumers, they need to more vigorously utilize social media and digital platforms and offer more wines at lower price points, according to a survey of the 2015 American wine consumer conducted by the Wine Business Institute of Sonoma State University’s School of Business and Economics.
Not surprisingly, Facebook is the Big Dog of social media, with 84 percent of survey participants reporting using it. Next came YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, with a paltry 6 percent of those surveyed saying a pox on all your filthy social media. Despite those philistines, 54 percent of respondents use social media to get wine information, with almost as many using it to get wine recommendations from friends, look up wine prices and discuss wine in general.
Forty-three percent of those surveyed use their smartphone to look up wine prices, while a quarter of them use smartphone apps to get wine information.
Also not surprisingly, wine drinkers are still price conscious, with a third of those surveyed saying their sweet spot for at-home consumption being between $10 and $15 a bottle. The remaining respondents are pretty evenly split between lower-priced wines and higher.
At restaurants, almost a quarter of respondents purchase wines from $26 to $35 a bottle, though a third report only buying wines by the glass or (horrors!) not buying wine at all. So far, at least consumers are shying away from those ever-escalating by-the-glass prices, with more than half saying their per glass purchases range from $7 to $10. Only 5 percent report paying more than $15 for a glass of wine, which should give restaurateurs who always seem to be raising their by-the-glass prices at least a moment’s pause.
Millennials and Fine Wine
The Millennial generation, typically defined as adults between the ages of 18 and 33, has already completely changed the way we buy and drink wine, how wine is marketed and purchased. It’s a whole new wine ball game. Or so the narrative goes.
But maybe not. At least when it comes to “fine wine”—wines costing $20 a bottle and up. According to the definitive Silicon Valley Bank’s “State of the Wine Industry 2015,” despite all the media hype about Millennials’ revolutionizing the selling and drinking of wine, they “have yet to make a dent in the fine wine business.”
As most things do, it all comes down to money. E.g., Boomers still have most of it. Millennials, unfortunately for them, are struggling with the worst job market in recent memory and are carrying record levels of student debt. Even those with good jobs are still far from the peak of their earning potential, meaning those $20 and up wines are more aspirational than actually consumed.
Though the influence of Millennials are lower price points is growing, the report notes that, “the reality is—no matter what a generation is called, the most active buyers of fine wine and luxury goods will continue to be in the 35- to 55-year age group.”
And what about Millennials’ embrace of technology and social media, their supposed disdain for brick-and-mortar purchases in favor of the buying everything over the almighty Internet? According to a study by the Cal Poly Wine and Viticulture Department, most of their purchases are—believe it or not—at the grocery store.
Just like Mom and Dad.
Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“Stick a Screwcap in It. . .”
That’s something winemakers may be saying a lot more of in the future, as screwcaps continue to improve, gain consumer acceptance and make in-roads versus natural cork stoppers.
The percentage of North American wineries using screwcaps on at least some of their wines has reportedly risen from five percent in 2004 to 38 percent in 2013, though natural cork still dominates the American wine market. Not so in Australia and New Zealand, however, where some 85 to 90 percent of all wines are sold with screwcap closures.
The reasons are simple. Screwcaps are cheaper and easier to open, store and ship. The big reason, though, is something called 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole or TCA, a compound that can infect natural cork and transfer itself to wine, caus-ing characteristic moldy “wet dog” aromas and flavors. It’s estimated that any-where from three to 10 percent of all wines are “corked,” costing vintners mil-lions of dollars a year and turning off consumers who found their favorite bottle of wine suddenly smelled like Fido in a rainstorm.
But there are some caveats. Natural cork has “breathability,” the capabil-ity of letting in tiny amounts of oxygen that help a wine age properly but not so much as to cause it to oxidize. Natural cork is more environmentally friendly, and is still by a large margin consumers’ preferred wine closure. And let’s face it, there’s not much romance in the sound of someone twisting off a screwcap.
Still, screwcaps’ price, ease of use and shipping, and immunity to TCA may be increasingly tough to ignore by vintners and consumers alike. Already some manufacturers are selling screwcaps that mimic cork’s breathability, and consumer acceptance is growing. The results of a study by UC Davis on the af-fects of different types of closures on 600 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc may shed more light on the subject. Or it may just keep the debate going.
Wine Wizardry?
Orson Welles made commercial history back in the 1970s by intoning for Paul Masson Winery, “We will sell no wine before its time.”
Today, that time could be in as little as 15 minutes, at least according to the makers of a soon-to-debut device that purports to be able to mimic the mellowing effects of aging on wine. The Wine Wizard uses a machine called the Agronifier, developed by Ferris Holding of Las Vegas, that can allegedly increase a wine’s pH, thus reducing acidity and sulfites through a process called Electromagnetic Treatment Matrix (ETM).
Ferris Holding claims that in more than 150 blind taste tests, mostly on wines in the $6 to $12-a-bottle range, some 97 percent of tasters said the flavor of red wine was improved by the ETM process, while 90 percent said it improved the wine’s aroma. White wine taste tests were reported to be almost as positive, with 85 of tasters indicating improved flavor, though with no discernible effects on aroma.
Wine Wizard owner CleanPath Resources Group even claims the device is capable of mellowing hard liquor, from vodka to single-malt scotch. CEO Ken Lewis calls it “amazing,” and says the Wine Wizard should go on sale by the end of the year. Dessert wines and bubbly, however, are seemingly immune to ETM’s beneficial effects, reportedly defeated by high sugar levels and carbonation.
Not everyone is as enamored of the Wine Wizard as its owners, however, with one website questioning the effectiveness of the Agronifier and having less than kind words for Lewis and CleanPath. We’ll see. As they say, the proof is in the wine glass.