“Time flies,” as the saying goes. Except when you’re waiting in line at the DMV, on hold with your favorite cable TV provider, and aging wine and spirits.
Well, California-based Cavitation Technologies can’t help you with the first two. But giving wine and hard liquor the benefits of years of patient aging in a couple minutes? They think they’re on to something.
That “something” is a countertop box that resembles a home kitchen coffeemaker, which the company hopes to soon put into production and make available at your local big box retailer. You simply pour the wine/spirits into the machine, click it on, wait a couple minutes and then pour it out.
The idea behind the as-yet-unnamed invention is hydrodynamic cavitation, which is a pair of big, scientific-sounding words that, according to the company, involves using pressure and temperature to affect changes red-white wine, vodka-bourbon-rum-what-have-you at the molecular level, mimicking the process of barrel aging while, not at all incidentally, removing such impurities as methanol and butanol that can cause the dreaded too-much-to-drink hangover.
There does seem to be some confirmation of hydrodynamic cavitation’s promise beyond the company’s claims, as in the past few years a vodka and gin that had undergone the process each won awards at prestigious national wine and spirits competitions.
When this miracle box will be ready for mass marketing and what it will cost are still up in the air. But better booze and no hangover is definitely something worth waiting for.