Wine helper

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A colleague of mine sends me this picture and asks if I have ever seen it and does it work? No idea what it is. He tells me its a magnet and the owner swears that it makes the wine smoother. I am skeptical.

Anyone seen this or tried it? What is the theory?

Only works on non-flower days.

Pretty sure there was a topic here about this or something very much like it.

It works very well! Through the power of suggestion and/or the purchaser’s desire to feel that he or she wasn’t ripped off.

But only on screw cap bottles.

“Smooth” as a wine descriptor is often one of those warning signs that the person describing the wine doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about. Combine that with the use of the device referenced above and alarm bells are going off everywhere.

It’s like the Kristin Wiig SNL skit for the perfume called “Red Flag”, but for wine.

There have been a lot of miraculous magnetic wine aging devices, with fancy stories of how the magnetic fields change the wine by making or aligning long molecule chains or some other pseudo scientific claptrap.

I tested one of these at a tasting, double blind, with amateur winemakers. The group didn’t know they were testing an aging device. They had two glasses of the same wines, one had been through the device other hadn’t, and were asked to select the wine that was more mature.

Also took part in another tasting with various enthusiasts, again double blind, testing another magnetic aging device.

Neither tasting showed the wines that had been magnetised were identified as more mature or better.

There is one thing these devices do excel at, though, and that is separating the gullible from their money.

A wine storage close to one of the poles, will smoothen the wines fast, an equatorial storage will not! [wink.gif]
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-Søren.