Sparkling wine in less time

THE conventional way of making sparkling wine uses yeast to create a secondary fermentation to produce carbon dioxide that brings about effervescence. When the yeast has done its job, winemakers use the rotate and elevate technique, often done manually, to settle this yeast in the bottle neck, which is then subjected to freezing liquid. Once frozen, the yeast plug is removed. All in all, this entire traditional process takes 60 days. But what if it can be cut down to minutes?

Perhaps few would think to mess with age-old traditions like winemaking, but modern science is finding innovative ways to improve on it. Like say the use of nanotechnology.

A method developed by a research team in University of Ljubljana reduces the number of days – 60 to as low as 15 to 20 minutes. That’s roughly 4,000 times faster, so who can ignore this? The team have found a way to attach magnetised nanoparticles to the surface of the yeast, which hastens removal. Even with nanoparticles, the yeast remains the same all throughout the process, and more importantly the addition of nanoparticles have no effect on the quality of the wine in terms of bouquet, mouth feel body, taste and bubble size.

This breakthrough simply increases productivity. As population grows, food and beverage manufacturers are under pressure to become more efficient, explained David Brown, chief executive of the Institution of Chemical Engineers.

“Although many wine connoisseurs will stay loyal to traditional manufacturing methods, the inventiveness of chemical and biochemical engineers demonstrates that even wine production, which has been made for millennia, can be made more efficient with clever nanotechnology combined with simple magnets,” he said.