Just as the French wine industry is reeling from a glut of wines, some evil genius comes along and performs a coup de grace:
FOR those who yearn for a well-aged, full-bodied vintage wine but lack the funds to feed the habit, the solution may lie with a Japanese boffin, a zany-looking contraption, a couple of metres of latex tubing and a few hundred volts of electricity.
Which reminds me of a weekend I spent in Sheboygan.
Squirrelled away in his chemical engineering laboratory in rural Shizuoka, Hiroshi Tanaka has spent 15 years developing an electrolysis device that simulates, he claims, the effect of ageing in wines. In 15 seconds it transforms the cheapest, youngest plonks into fine old draughts as fruit flavours are enhanced and rough edges are mellowed, he says.
Electrolysis, huh? And here I thought that was just for getting whiskers out of grannies.
The machine works by pumping wine and tap water through a specially designed electrolysis chamber equipped with wafer-thin platinum electrodes. The water and wine are separated by an ion exchange membrane -- the key component, for which Mr Tanaka holds the patent.
Without diluting the wine, the electrolysis causes a rapid rearrangement of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms around the alcohol molecules, which would normally take place over years if the wine were ageing naturally. The electrolyser converts about 4litres of wine a minute.
Mr Tanaka and his team at Innovative Design and Technology are also designing a version for small-scale use.
Sort of like your very own electrolyser, no doubt. Something that can be carried discreetly in a handbag, say or a cosmetics bag. They will sell at Sharper Image under the pseudonym "personal grape massager."
Although Mr Tanaka may be on the verge of a crucial contribution to the history of wine, he confesses he does not like the stuff. He began his work on fruit juices and switched to alcoholic beverages only to soften the aftertaste of a particularly rough type of sake he drinks.
Ah, Tanaka, you old coot. Now we get to the bottom of it. You're just a budding Bukowski that goes in for "rough sake."
Meanwhile, as wines are set to get cheaper, pizza is going through the roof:
even in an age when triple-digit bills are unremarkable, Gordon Ramsay's £100 pizza has caused a stir in the nation's dining rooms. The speciality dish, now available at Ramsay's latest outlet, Maze, is a straightforward woodfire-baked pizza topped with onion purée, fontina cheese, mozzarella, cep mushrooms, pancetta, wild mizuna lettuce leaf, and - here's the sting - shavings from a £1,400 Umbrian white truffle.
The dish is, says Jason Atherton, a Maze chef, "a fantastic way of really experiencing the full flavour of the truffle". Which is, no doubt, exactly what the Black Amex brigade will be saying to their trophy partners while they order this trophy dish, pausing only to ask the waiter if they can have theirs with a "stuffed crust".
There was, of course, the $99 burger at Daniel Boloud's place and a champagne cocktail made from Crystal and gold leaf, or something like that. And there's also Buddha Jumps Over The Wall Soup. So far, We haven't seen anything like the Ghazi Blows His Brains All Over The Office Spaghetti, yet.
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