Aging of wines and other spiritous products, acceleration by physical treatments

Abstract

The quality of wines and other spiritous products is strongly influenced by the nature and the length of the aging treatment to which the product is subjected. The traditional methods of aging wines and related products are costly and slow. Their effects are imperfectly understood with the result that they are unpredictable, poorly controlled, and wasteful. Nearly every conceivable physical treatment has been tested as a means of improving the quality of spiritous products by accelerating or simulating aging. The results of these tests are often individually unconvincing or apparently conflicting, involving as they do many problems of engineering, chemistry, and quality evaluation. The extensive and scattered bibliography on this subject has been collected, summarized, and evaluated in the light of recent developments. This publication aims at informing on the one hand, chemists and food scientists regarding the state of the art and future possibilities of accelerated wine and spiritous beverage aging; and, on the other hand, persons in the industry regarding the scientific understanding of the effects produced by various physical treatments intended to accelerate aging. It is hoped that both basic scientific and commercial research will be stimulated and to that end several suggestions are made upon lines of attack that appear promising for further study.