Fascinating stuff indeed - modified polymers can remove the acrid flavor imparted by smoke taint.
Hopefully we will not have to deal with this issue again for awhile - but if we do, it’s good to know that there are new tools being developed to deal with it.
And I know that there is a task force made up of folks from UC Davis as well as other universities looking at this as well and working to develop ways to deal with it.
Cheers!
Sounds a lot like the saran wrap trick for TCA. Does it perceptibly reduce the TCA? IME, yes some. Does it also strip the wine? Absolutely guts the soul. In the end, you’re still out a bottle of wine and now you lost some saran wrap.
Is it the saran wrap that guts the wine? Or just the fact that TCA has a sub-threshold level where it still wrecks the wine and the saran wrap only gets you to sub-threshold level TCA? The less than perceptable level TCA bottles are the winemakers worst scenario for TCA because they just look like bad wines, and I certainly don’t miss them at all.
IMO, these are apples and oranges. The sad part is that it’s unlikely anyone will ever use them and state it because if they work, it’s easier for most wineries to just say they didn’t have smoke taint.
In looking at this, there’s two issues. One is that the compounds treated are the ones that ETS tests for but correllation for smoke taint flavors is only moderate, there’s another set of thiol based molecules involved. Whether those can be treated with MIPs would need to be addressed. Also, treatment only removed roughly a third to half of the compounds, and no mention is made of the bound molecules or free.
And of course, it does strip the wine.
Most of us aiming for top wine do not see this as a solution, since emaciating the wine is not acceptable;e. But for those making less expensive wines, it is probably more useful. We are hoping a real solution can be found before we have this issue again.
It doesn’t sound like the results are much different than some fining trials I did on a wine I made in 2020 here. Ultimately it was usable in a blend - someone else’s low priced blend after I sold it in bulk.
If it didn’t taste like Eola-Amity fruit any more, I wasn’t interested. I’m prouder of letting 20 more acres rot on the vine than I am of the beating I gave this wine in order to sell it for a loss.
Yeah, this is a tool for the bulk market.