I have always wondered if it made sense to centrifuge aged wine that had sediment in the bottle on order to clarify it…?
Having used big lab centrifuges in my undergrad Biology course I can see it would work but do you also lose other elements that contribute to the flavour - maybe the volatile compounds that give a wine its “nose”. I know people talk about aged wines being delicate and you need to handle them carefully - but again how accurate is that…?
Maybe someone could experiment with this device and advise…until then I will continue to carefully decant through a pair of old panty hose.
Well, the spinzall is pretty much an open centrifuge, especially if you seen the continuous mode it runs. The top portion of the lid allows liquid access through that port so you have an open portion. Volatiles will well volatilize. When I ran one with strawberry juice, the aroma was very noticeable. Now whether or not this makes the wine better, I don’t know but it will cause all the sediments to be stuck on the side of the rotor…
Well, I have noticed a loss of flavor with some liquids run through the centrifuge. I speak primarily of my lab centrifuge. But I spin such intense pastes and purees that the final result isn’t affected in most cases.
But the other day I ran a fresh root based ginger/turmeric/ginseng syrup through the Spinzall vs. a mild filtration through one layer of paper towel. The original syrup was too thick and chunky with unpleasant particles to use. My fault since I ran the turmeric root and ginseng root through the juicer first, then the ginger root. When I should have run them in the exact reverse order so that the fibrous roots would have filtered the more pulpy turmeric. I filtered through a paper towel and lost about 30% flavor, an acceptable loss. Through the Spinzall, no enzymes of hydrocolloids, for 20 minutes, I had an apx. 50% loss of flavor. I think this was because I span it too long and 5-10 minutes would have been fine. I will do so later and report back.
Wine might be a very different case. Actually I am positive it would negatively affect it. Just from my experiences with other beverage liquids. But I’m not going to try it with a great wine. And I rarely have mediocre wines with sediment to deal with. If some one wants to send me some to run through a lab centrifuge, Spinzall, vs. light lab and/or home filtering, I’d be happy to report the results.
I don’t filter wines with sediment much. I first decant properly, that is gently pouring off the top layer with no sediment, and reserving in a decanter. Then the sediment layer I filter or decant gently into a separate glass or container. This I save for myself for later, since it may still have sediment, or loss of flavor from filtering. Depending upon how I treated the sediment.
I will stick to decanting - I also decant properly, usually standing the bottle for a good week before I open it. I only use the panty hose to filter out cork when old and fragile corks disintegrate.
That said maybe the better technique would be to centrifuge unopened bottles to protect again the loss of volatile compounds but still consolidate the sediment. The only problem (other than the size of the centrifuge) I see is having to do two bottles of the same wine at the same time to balance the centrifuge.
I bet its a good business opportunity to extract money from those that have more of it than good sense. It would be what every home wine cellar needs - your could do two, and four bottle centrifuges.
It probably needs to be modestly powered as you don’t want to turn your best Cab Sav into half a bottle of red and half of white with a sip of rose in the middle…
Hmm you could try the old champagne method. Have the sediments near the cork area after a few months of racking the wine and then freeze the top and somehow only extract that top part and then plug the wine back…
