Please do that experiment, James. Take an empty btl, pour a glass of wine into it (or just take a glass of wine itself) and set it out on
the counter. The product of oxidation in wine is VA/acetic acid/vinegar and acetaldehyde. Then observe how long it takes for those products
to show up in that wine. And then report back to us.
Tom
If the hypothesis is that a standard “slow oxidation” process doesn’t notably change a wine then the way to validate that isn’t to try and build up a first principles argument. No lab - academic, industrial, government, whatever would do try and do that as a basis for decisions. Because there’s a huge leap from “O2 diffuses slowly in water” to a real world environment that involves consumers opening bottles by all the variable ways that people open them, even within slow ox, and there are too many variables with not only that but wine chemistry in general to easily and effectively test. At the end of the day it’s neither feasible nor important to enumerate and then evaluate each and all of the possible reasons that any change may occur; it’s a lot more efficient to simply establish whether the consumer perceives a change. And if the null hypothesis is “doesn’t notably change”, then you wouldn’t do a standard “which glass do you like better test” as practiced at off lines, because that presumes there’s actually a change and that’s not what you’re testing. You would dig into your bag of experience and sensory tests and settle on some sort of discrimination test.
Alan’s post is an argument. That’s it. It’s based on sound scientific principles, and it may be a starting point to believe one way or another, but it’s not “doing science”.
Comedy hour
Based upon previous threads, some of it is off gassing of volatiles that may have developed in the wine too. So not so much as letting the good air in, but also letting some bad stuff out.
+1
It is an overly simplistic argument built on high school science that fails to account for several important principles that govern the phenomenon he is trying to say doesn’t exist.
Calling it “based on sound scientific principles” is being generous, especially given the title of the thread, but I absolutely agree with the rest of your post!
Indeed, if you’re hammered, all things seem possible.
So is the thought that the agitation of pouring out the wine in making a difference? My read of Alan’s argument is that diffusion alone, even over the larger surface area, is insufficient.
I am struggling with the mechanism. I have many, many experiences where slow ox appears to have a significant effect on older bottles, including color change.
If you use the calculator you’ll see that very little oxygen diffusion occurs within 24-48 hours. Even a half full bottle would still require about 2 weeks for oxygen to traverse the remaining amount of liquid via simple diffusion.
Then add in the function of adding oxygen which is to oxidize compounds in the water. As the oxygen is in contact with these compounds they may oxidize quickly or slowly, so it is no just the adding of the oxygen, it could be the other products present.
If I were to have a bottle with dissolved Iron in it, over time with enough oxygen the Iron will oxidize out of solution, settling as a brown solid in the bottom of the container.
This thread is a wonderful example of the difficulty behind wine sensation. A concerted scientific effort is stymied by the confluence of human sensory variability and the incomplete understanding of the chemical dynamics which produce compelling wines.
We are in some ways in the dark ages of wine understanding, like mideval scholars testing various leeches and biles. There is some romance to this of course but these reads will be quite amusing for wine historians in future generations.
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Isn’t part of the point to allow ‘bad smell’ to escape?
I don’t know about the calculation, but if your theory is that half-empty bottles of wine left on the counter 2 weeks won’t oxidize, you’re going to have to alter your theory to fit with the actual results.
We may be discussing different things here:
- oxidation vs off-gassing of volatiles
- effects on opened but undisturbed bottles vs decanted bottles vs pouring off a small quantity
The first question is more fundamental in my opinion. I don’t have the answers but it seems unlikely to me that true oxidation is playing any significant role over a few hours. Something happens after a wine is poured or decanted. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. It’s harder to tell if anything significant happens when a bottle is opened and left undisturbed as the only input is smelling the top of the bottle. Not a particularly representative measure of the wine’s aroma or taste. And there’s no control for comparison.
The second question has more to do with the speed of whatever changes are occurring.
+1
To be fair, that’s the implicit assumption behind most of the threads on decanting/slow-ox’ing, etc. here, so I guess that’s what Alan’s responding to. But it ignores volatilization and who knows what else.
You got it! The slow OD concept was advanced by Francoise Audouze for very, very old wines, where decanting might push them over the edge into oxidation. The idea was to give a chance for funky things to blow off. The technique was designed to avoid introducing oxygen!
Then people started doing this with young wines, completely misunderstanding the original thinking.
Seems to me that the key issue is simply that process is misnamed. “Slow de-vol” anyone???
Peter
I think that’s why it’s called “Audouzing.”
So where the heck is Alan? He comes along here, lobs this hand grenade over the wall,
and then disappears.
Please come back, Alan…all is forgiven!! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
Interesting discussions here in this thread. But it’s not going to change any minds of things
people “know” to be true. “Science” fails us. Doesn’t work in Wash/DC anymore and still
doesn’t work in CyberSpace, either.
Tom
I love wine because many times it doesn’t need science.
With apologies to the Bard, there are more things in heaven and earth, Alan, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It seems a good time to repeat a cautionary tale told many times, but not yet on this forum:
I trained as an engineer, and by nature have an analytical approach to things. I am naturally skeptical when there is no logical, rational, or scientific explanation or explicable mechanism for anecdotal phenomena. Slow ox is a good enough example; travel shock is another. But I learned many years ago–a hard lesson for me–that is is shortsighted to reject out-of-hand empirical conclusions simply because I do not understand the underlying mechanisms, as the following story explains.
In the mid-70s, while in law school, I rented a farm house in rural Durham County NC. It came with woods for hunting, ponds for fishing, and fields (plus the use of an old Farmall tractor) for as big a garden as I might want. The first Spring on the “farm,” I took full advantage of my gardening opportunities.
Early one Saturday morning, having already sunk posts and strung wire, I was busy planting pole beans (‘Kentucky Wonders’ IIRC) when Hettie Hux, my landlady and closest neighbor, walked over to chat. Hettie was a spry octogenarian with strong opinions softened only by her innate Southern charm. She asked what I was doing. When told, “Planting beans,” she replied: “I don’t believe I would do that today.” When I asked why not, Hettie reached into the pocket of her apron (which she always wore except when going to church) and pulled out a dog-eared Old Farmers Almanac. She turned to the astrological tables, pointed out the positions of Cancer and Scorpio, and pronounced emphatically: “It’s bug days. If you plant beans now, the bugs will eat 'em up!” I thanked her for the advice, we chatted for a while, she went off to deal with other things–and I, paying absolutely no heed to her cosmic warning, went right back to planting beans.
Fast forward some weeks, when the bean plants are blooming profusely tiny bean pods are just starting to form. That’s when the Japanese beetles attacked, in swarming hordes. I don’t think there was enough Sevin Dust (carbaryl) manufactured in North America to save my beans from the onslaught, though Lord knows I tried. Meanwhile, just a quarter mile away, the pole beans Hettie planted about 10 days after I planted mine were not under attack at all. Strange. I asked her why it worked that way, and her only explanation had to do with Cancer and Scorpio. Completely unsatisfying to me.
Fast forward again, to the following February. I had some seed potatoes, and walked over to ask Hettie to would show me how to cut them up for planting (something I already knew and had been doing for years; I just wanted to start a conversation about gardening). Hettie pulled her Case knife out of her apron pocket and began to demonstrate, but also asked, with caution in her voice: “You’re not going to plant them now, are you?!” I asked why I shouldn’t, and she explained: “You plant potatoes on dark nights [i.e., under a new moon] in March.” I thanked her, and dutifully waited for the March new moon to plant my potatoes.
At the same time, Hettie asked me if I would like to know how to plant my potatoes so that “potato bugs” [i.e., Colorado potato beetles, _Leptinotarsa decemlineata_] wouldn’t get on them. Of course I did! She told me to till and level the soil, but not to plow rows. Then, she said, place seed pieces on top of the soil in 1 foot grids, press them into the soft soil (no need to even cover them), then top with at least 12 inches of heavy mulch–wheat straw, leaves, newspaper, didn’t matter, as long as it was at least a foot thick. I asked how that worked and she didn’t know how, she just knew from received wisdom and personal experience that it did. The plants would grow through the mulch, and would have few or no “potato bugs” on them. As an added advantage, she told me, when it came time to harvest potatoes, all you had to do was rake back the mulch and take however many potatoes you wanted, which would be lying on top of the ground. It all worked flawlessly, just as Hettie said it would. No beetles (and no insecticides), no weeding, easy harvest.
It wasn’t until years later, when I read in a Rodale Press organic gardening book about a “Lazy Man’s Potato Bed,” that I learned how the heavy mulch interrupts the life cycle of the Colorado potato beetle–something that Hettie never knew. She just knew, from received wisdom and experience, that it worked.
So, maybe there really is such thing as “travel shock” in wine; I remain skeptical, but never say never. And perhaps slow ox really works, in a way unlimited by slow diffusion rates; I know I have had good experience using it.
Things that are true are true whether or not we understand why, something I constantly have to remind myself. A healthy skepticism is well and good, but a closed mind to possibilities is not.
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