VIntage Enhancer

[tomstevenson]

Jerry, turn to page 283 in my Christie's World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine and you'll see a wine-ageing pyramid 'Cheops' still in use. It's used by Stephen Cipes at Summerhill Estate in British Columbia for his eponymously named Cipes sparkling wine. Stephen Cipes is an eccentric and a nice, softly spoken, very charming person. He plays a mean piano, but he does not play it any better in the pyramid than out. He once got me inside the damn thing on BC television doing bloody exercises! After five minutes exercising, he told me to rub my hands together very fast them hold them a few inches apart. "Do you feel the prickly sensation of energy from the Cheops pyramid flowing from one hand to the other?" he asked. "No", I panted, completely knackered after the exercises. "I can feel a prickly sensation, but after rubbing hands together like than anyone would feel a prickly sensation. It's just the capillaries going like the clappers."

Amshih, as to your "Electronic Vintage Enhancer" it's just a load pseudo-scientific crap and as you correctly point out, they can't even get the basics right. There are many ways of artificially ageing wines that work and some winemakers regularly employ, but the one thing that the wine trade and wine writers need to get across to consumers is the longer a wine takes to achieve complexity, the greater the finesse (it's what we loosely refer to as "ageing with grace") and the shorter a wine takes to age, the coarser the effect.