BLENDER THAT RED WINE!

This takes decanting your wine to a whole new level. In general, aerating wine can take anywhere from one to several hours. But inventor and amateur chef Nathan Myhrvold has an even better and faster way: Put it in the blender. In a speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Myhrvold said that “blending” wine makes it react with air more quickly, performing the same role as decanting but faster. Myhrvold also has another reason he likes to whip up a wine smoothie: “The looks on people’s faces,” he said. “If you do this with a wine expert in the room – it’s as if you committed some deeply unnatural act. But it’s food. Why is it OK with daiquiris and not with Bordeaux?”

There are several possible explanations for why decanting, or blending, improves the taste, said Myhrvold, who holds nearly 25O technology-related patents and recently wrote a tome about the science of cooking, titled “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (The Cooking Lab, 2O11). The practice could lead to the oxidization of certain flavor compounds, vent pent-up gases such as sulfur dioxide or release other volatile components from the wine, he said. Myhrvold performed his magic for a Spanish duke, one of the top winemakers in Spain, throwing the royal’s favorite red wine into the blender. The duke did a blind taste test and preferred the blended one, but didn’t believe Myhrvold afterward. If he’d “been a duke from years of old he would have run me through with his sword right there,” said Myhrvold, who was once the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft and is now CEO of the patent company Intellectual Ventures. It may sound weird but isn’t your curiosity piqued? We know what we’re doing with the next bottle of red we open!