I think you should be able to place an unopened bottle in the microwave and blast it to kill the brett. Like sterilizing a sponge.
It would be ideal not to heat the wine so maybe start with a wine at refrigerator temperature. Hit it a couple of times for 30 seconds and no more brett. Shouldn’t change the flavor of the wine.
Probably be worth testing on 2007 CNdP. Blast one and not the other. Then open and let them sit in separate decanters for an hour, then smell and taste.
I do not think heating wine will change the damage already done to a wine from brett takeover. Yes, heating may kill any new growth of brett yeast and not allow it to taint any further, what ever was built up before the heating will remain. So in theory the bretty aroma and taste will remain in the heated sample. But by all means, please report on your results and findings.
I was thinking that it’s not the heating that kills the brett, it’s the actually microwaves themselves. The idea is not to heat the wine to a boiling point to kill the bacteria.
And yes, screw tops and aluminum foil capsules would not be good unless you like fireworks.
This has to work through heat, microwaving boils the water in the sponge thus heating it up and killing the bacteria. You would have to get the wine up to a temperature where the bacteria dies. The wine would be ruined and the bottle would explode. The wavelength of microwaves is something like a centimeter I think, much bigger than the size of bacteria cells. Notice the metal grate on your microwave window.
-What temp. is actually needed here ? (To sterilize correct it’s 121C or 250F (at 15PSI) for 15 min.)
I don’t know the lethal temp. for the yeast Brettanomyces, but I guess it’s higher than for the wine’s survival.
-If corked, it will protrude with the expansion of the wine, when heated/cooked.
-How long time will it remain hot, before cooled down to storage/drinking temp.?
And I don’t think brett tastes like shit because it is alive; if the brett is still there, but dead carcasses instead of living beasties, I think it would still taste like shit. Or like heaven to Alfert
It’s not the yeasts themselves that smell, it’s compounds they produce: 4-ethyl phenol (4-ep), 4-ethyl guaiacol (4-eg) and isovaleric acid. Zapping the wine probably won’t help if those are already in there.
Looks like a microwave oven kills organisms by heating and you’d need great than 100C to do the trick. There are other commercial technologies, like you mention, that irradiated without high temperature.
I think the irradiating idea could have some merit if done at the winery/bottler. This would kill brett then and prevent it growing in bottle. The question is whether the radiation would affect complex organic chemicals in the wine (polyphenols, tannins, etc.)
As others have said, Brett is a spoilage yeast, not bacteria. And if a wine already ‘smells’ like brett, there’s nothing you can do on the consumer end to remove it. At the commercial side, they are working on ‘selective filtration’ to try to remove some of the by products, but you’re bound to have a ‘stripped’ wine.
The idea of killing life brett cells during barrel aging is another story. What many are doing as of now is ‘zapping’ the wine with Velcorin, otherwise known as Dimethyl Dicarbonate. It’s very effective at killing all living yeast cells, but has methanol as a by product. I’ve never used and most likely never will - don’t like that as a by product - but many other wineries use this, especially at bottling, in lieu of sterile filtration because they’d rather say their wines are ‘unfiltered’, even if they are ‘nuking’ them
Sterile filtration also kills live brett cells, but does not remove dead ones or what’s left over from a brett bloom . . .
I think a better experiment is to take an unfiltered wine that ‘may’ have brett and store it at different temperatures for a month or two and note the differences . . .
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