When Light Strikes
posted by mark in Snooth, Wine
In the comments of my post about wine faults, Snooth wine trivia master RBoulanger suggests that we put our own taste buds on the line for the Snooth community. So we will.
We’ll buy three bottles of a delicate white wine and run the experiment over one month.
Control: The first bottle will go in my wine fridge at home.
Cooked Wine: The second bottle will be placed in a cooler, closed in, and stored on my roof. There it should be exposed to plenty of heat but no light.
Light Strike: The final bottle will be exposed to UV light but not heat. This is difficult to pull off. The current plan is to buy a mini UV lamp or three and keep the wine in a container with the lamps in a cool place. The lamps will hopefully give off little heat. If you have suggestions for how better to create UV light without heat, please chime in here!
We’ll add a thermometer to each container to monitor the temperature.
And how did we choose the wine? It turns out Snooth makes it pretty simple to find a delicate white wine under 10 dollars. We’ll be using the Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc 2004.
Thanks for doing this, I am excited to here how it turns out. I don’t have any recommendations for how to create UV light without heat, but at least you can compare the outcome of that wine to the one that gets heat only and see if some things are similar.
2004??
I’d use something a little more recent. Who knows what the 2004 has been through already. I’d stick with the low-acid no-oak style.
CNS
@CNSmith — Good point! Yeah that’s way too old for the Kenwood. Full disclosure is that I saw it over at the Trader Joe’s wine store, but it must have been the 2006 or 2007. Well, whatever they have I’ll use.
Unless you have another suggestion for a specific wine? Maybe we could try a few different types.
@Ocean — Yeah that’ll have to be good enough. We’ll see how it goes!
I think tanning beds kick out some SERIOUS UVs. Check with your local tanning booth.
Get the 2007 if you can - the fresher, the better IMO.
I think using a wine with a screwcap closure would also be preferable.
Tanning beds, eh? That could definitely work… I wonder how long we’d have to leave it though. I also wonder if anyone has ever paid for a straight month of full time tanning before.
In the end I’ll probably go with the mini lamps so that I can subject the bottles to steady UV light for a full month. Hopefully that allows us to come closer to having the same reaction between the cooked and the light struck wine.
Okay, I’d just like to see someone walk into a tanning place with a bottle of wine and make this request. Can you imagine how the sales person would react?!
Mark - I hope to be invited to the unveiling. I have saved up some brown bags and rubber bands so that we can taste these 3 bottles blind to counter for the placebo effect (this wine was in the tanning salon for a whole month… it tastes like baked plastic).
@Ocean — That’s just a great mental image. I’ve got half a mind to try.
@RBoulanger — Good idea on the blind tasting. You should definitely join us. The more opinions the better.
I wonder what Kenwood thinks of the experiment… :)
So….what happened??
I’ll ping the testers and find out…
Not enough time has passed yet.
Its been only a month since Mark set it up. I think it’ll take 8 weeks or so for them really deteriorate properly.
I was going eith the second line from the original post.
I haven’t even started yet. I was waiting to get back from my trip, and usually August is the hottest month around here so I was hoping to get the full brunt of August leveled at those poor wine bottles. That said, I have been preparing. Recently I invested in two thermometers that store data about the high and low temperatures they’re seeing. I’m hoping I can use these to get a good sense of what kind of temperatures we subjected the wines to. Also, I managed to track down a UV light sensor so we can take some readings on that as well.
RBoulanger brings up a good point though — one thing we weren’t going to account for is time. So I have decided to extend the experiment and do 6 bottles. I’ll taste one control, one heat struck and one light struck wine after one month, and the second after two months. That way we can also try to decide how the time effects the degradation.
I’ll throw up a quickly blog post once the experiment is set up and in place. Hopefully I’ll start early next week when my UV light sources arrive.
I look forward to the results.
How’s it coming so far?
CNS
It is going well! I think we can schedule the tasting soon, maybe for next week.
Intersting results. I am pleased to see them finally published!
Me too — everyone should let me know if they think of something else I can test.