Thanks for the detailed info Larry. My wife is very very strict with avoiding intake of additives, chemicals and selection of what goes into her body. Knowing about Velcorin gives me another thing to look into when selecting wines and winemakers. Here I thought roundup was the worst of my problems.
Back on the original topic, the idea of microwaved wine is enough to turn me off even if it did remove brett overgrowth. Sounds like there is no real benefit anyways.
Barry,
One of the challenges with Velcorin, like most else in wine, is that a winery does not need to disclose that they use it . . . and some apply it more than one time during the process. It is so used that winemakers often refer to it as Vitamin V. You can always ask winemakers if they use it and many will be straightforward with you, especially smaller producers.
Generally speaking, there is a greater chance of seeing it used by wineries that do not filter than filter IMHO. Curious to hear what other wineries have to say about this . . .
Cheers!
Velcorin is why your “fresh squeezed” orange juice can sit in your refrigerator open for weeks. It’s in a lot of drinks.
It can kill you but only in the first 24 hours after application so you got that going for you…
You are right that it is used in many other beverages. The challenge is that when alcohol is present when used, one of the byproducts is methanol.
There is a poor guy called Brett on an Aussie forum. I think he takes all this personally!
John and Larry nailed it. Whether or not you kill could brett by nuking a bottle, it will have no effect on these compounds that produce unpleasant sensory perceptions and are already in the wine. So don’t bother nuking your wine to try and get rid of brett.
This calls for a Berserker Poll!
It’s my understanding that Velcorin use is more cost effective than sterile filtration on small lots. I’ve heard it used to prevent secondary fermentation after bottling.
Not quite true Larry. Velcorin breaks down to methanol + CO2 in wine or any aqueous liquids, which includes the juices/water/etc velcorin is used with (Velcorin breakdown produces various other compounds produced in ‘minor’ amounts as well).
The thing about methanol in wine is: methanol is in all wines (in very tiny amounts) naturally (produced during fermentation)…this is true of other products as well. Second, when consumed, ethanol blocks the absorption of methanol (and instead gets passed out via urine). So, in theory, there’d be less risk (wrt methanol) of consuming wine than other other non-alcoholic products.
All in all tho, it seems better to pcr/plate test for brett and, if present, handle it another way. Cross flow being one…I know wineries that prefer to cross flow filter their wines not having anything to do with possible microbial issues (i.e. they prefer the wine XFed).
Velcorin would work to prevent secondary fermentation in the bottle if you’re talking about wines with RS starting up again, since the Velcorin kills yeast cells. It’s my understanding that it does not kill bacteria though, so if a wine is not fully through malolactic fermentation, Velcorin would not prevent that from potentially starting up again in the bottle. Sterile filtration should prevent both issues.
Article about velcorin, for those interested. Blog post from Kristy Charles of Foursight Wines, which is berserker Joe Webb’s winery I beleive!
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) household microwaves don’t produce the sort of ionizing radiation that could kill microorganisms without boiling your wine.
The blog post reminds me of the kind of scaremongering I expect in a Food Babe article. The LD50 for oral consumption by a female rat is 335 mg/kg and the maximum dose is 200 mg/l. It also hydrolyzes completely in 7.5 hours at 4 degrees C, and within about 4 hours at 10 degrees C (about 50 degrees F).
So, unless you are drinking the wine within 8 hours of it being treated, you aren’t at risk at all. If you really screwed up and drank a full bottle immediately after an inoculation at the highest dose allowed by law, you would have ingested about 150 mg, If you weigh 90 lbs, the LD50 amount would be 13,705 mg, so you would have ingested about 1% of a lethal dose if you were a female rat. While it is possible that it is much more toxic in humans than in female rats, it is unlikely that it is enough more poisonous to be of great concern.
Yeah, but…microwaves.
I think they knock the toxins from the label right into the wine.
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Interesting information thanks for jumping in, Eric. I’ve heard some of this but not all of it.
A quick question, though - do these other beverage products have legal limitations to the amount of methanol that can be in them like wine does? And is that an absolute path way you’re talking about or some of the time, depending upon alcohol level, and other factors?
Cheers.
Jenny McCarthy gave me some alternative facts
I Jenny world it would only be wine juice, because they “inoculate” it with yeast.
Ahh the 2012 blog post comes up again. Were all about disclosure and list ingredients(grapes and sulfur or grapes, tartaric acid and sulfur) and suitable for “vegetarians and vegans” on our labels. The impetus for this article was seeing it used on a bottling line at a facility we were working at before we had our own facility. Then hearing about a few of our favorite PN producers who do unfiltered wines using it, I have also toured many a PN producer who claim no filtration when there is a filter in the corner. We also know someone who ran a mobile bottling line and the first time they had it used on their line 3 people went to the emergency room, 2 minor 1 major issues. The workers who ran the line took some wine home and drank it that night not knowing what they were in for. She cut and pasted from the MSDS for the product so the warnings are the manufactures reccomendations for handling and using the product.
If wineries are so proud of using it why don’t folks disclose it? How it can bee added to food stuffs and not listed on the label is beyond me, great lobbyists they have.
As to the residual methanol (and histamine) in wine/our wine this item has come up along with our feelings on Vitamin V. So I had my wines tested for that as many have stated that wild yeast/ml wines would have more than inoculated yeast/ml wines. The results were less methane in my wine 90 mg/l less than the residual left behind from a max legal dose at bottling of vitamin V. Legal total in wine is 1000 mg/l. Our histamine levels were below detectable levels by ets at <1.0 mg/l. Unless some folks want to start posting those numbers (which no one would do the last few times this came up) I am not real sure how to compare residual methanol levels to wines made different ways and treated or not treated with Velcorin.
A nearly the same time we had all that testing done (mid harvest) I had out yeast tested as many of the same folks stating that there is not such thing as wild yeast were the same ones making the above assumptions. We built a brand new facility that has only had estate fruit from the same property thru it and never any commercial strains of yeast or ML on site. I have no working wineries near me for at least a couple of miles. I pulled a sample from the middle of the vineyard harvested in the middle of harvest at the middle of its fermentation and they found 50 strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, 16 of which were high enough in number to have an impact on the fermentation. None of them matched the ETS database of 155 commercial strains on the DNA level.
To the original question Brig brought up, I have only one solution, stop drinking wine with brett! If you bought some and did not know it did and you don’t like it return it. Im sensitive to it and can’t stand it.
Years ago I took some winemakers to a Giants game. Brett Butler got a hit and one of them cheered, Yeah, Brett…!! I said I never thought I would never hear a winemaker cheer for brett. The assistant winemaker then said, That’s because Kevin Mitchell is on dekkera…
Seriously folks, I once visited a company in Bordeaux that bought used barrels and re-sold them.
One of the things they did (after removing the hoops etc) was to microwave the wood and supposedly this killed the brett.