Aging is the name of the game when it comes to fine wine. Top producers mature their brews in oak barrels; connoisseurs will keep a bottle in the cellar for years so they can savor the complex bouquet at its peak.For Hiroshi Tanaka, all that waiting is just a waste of time _ and he says he's got the machinery to prove it. Tanaka claims to have perfected a machine that can transform a bottle of just-fermented Beaujolais Nouveau into a fine, mellow wine in seconds, all by zapping it with a few volts of electricity.
"We can now electrolyze young wine and ship bottles of fine wine out in no time at all," declared Tanaka, president of Japanese startup Innovative Design and Technology Inc., which runs a small laboratory in Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo. "Think of the savings we'll make. Shorter production time, no need for storage, no need to invest in barrels," he said.
Wine connoisseurs are skeptical of the whole idea of immediate aging, but Tanaka's company is not the only laboratory chasing instant wine. He says his method is the most advanced and a key part of the machine that accomplishes the process has been patented.
The company is in talks with wineries in California and Washington state to start providing its U.S. affiliate, BW2 Holdings, with young wine to treat and sell, Tanaka said. BW2 hopes to sell the bottles on the Internet later this year for an affordable US$5.
The road to the Champs Elysees, however, won't be an easy one: the company has brought the machine around to Japanese wine producers, restaurants and even sake rice wine and "shochu" sweet potato spirit distillers, but so far only a small shochu maker in southern Japan has agreed to get involved.
In Europe -- where viniculture is considered a sacred cornerstone of civilization -- the idea of electrolyzed wine makes traditionalists blanche.
"I don't see how a machine could turn low quality wine into a magical and mature wine in seconds. I don't believe in it," said Emmanuel Delmas, Sommelier at the celebrated Fouquet's Restaurant on Paris's Champs Elysees.
Indeed, the techniques at Tanaka's laboratory are a long way from the vineyards of Bordeaux. In the natural maturation process, the taste of wine is enhanced by the mixture of alcohol with water molecule clusters, Tanaka says. Though the exact mechanism of water molecule clusters remain a matter of scientific debate, Tanaka claims the electrolysis treatment instantaneously breaks up water clusters in the wine, allowing the water to more thoroughly blend with the alcohol.
His company's machine is a two-chambered device roughly the size of a stereo. Wine passes through one and tap water passes through the other; a membrane the company has patented separates the two. Platinum electrodes provide the juice, driving negative ions -- the cause of acidity -- from the wine into the water.
To the untrained palate, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 strained through the machine became a more full-bodied, complex wine. Similar treatment to a Sauvignon Blanc 2004 resulted in a drier aftertaste.
The company has its eye on zapping other types of alcohol as well. "With acceptance, we can do well anywhere -- produce good wine for Europe, good sake for Japan, good vodka for Russia, good baijiu (white spirit) for China," Tanaka said. "The possibilities are endless."
On top of a faster production time, electrolyzed wine is healthier because it doesn't oxidize easily and requires no artificial anti-oxidizing agents that are present in almost all wines, according to Akihiro Hishima, another member of the development team. "Everybody who's tried our wine agrees -- this thing is revolutionary," Hishima said, swirling his wine glass and biting into a chunk of Camembert cheese.
The company's break into the U.S. market may prove to especially lucky. Americans downed about 2,443 million liters of wine in 2004, according to the California-based Wine Institute, and consumption is growing. A study by U.K.-based International Wine and Spirits Record says the U.S. will become the world's top consumer of wine as early as 2008.
In comparison, Japanese consumed a mere 247 million liters, where the drink lags behind beer, sake and shochu.
Still, Tanaka has no illusions about overturning millennia of wine history. "I know we'll face a lot of resistance from within the wine industry -- we already have," he said, recollecting a time in 2002 the firm took a prototype of the device to a wine producer in Italy. He declined to name the producer.
"We were told to leave the room, leave the country," he recalled. "And never come back."