Technology in a bottle
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...technology to help produce larger volumes to meet the demands of the public. Inexpensive table wine initially dominated the market, but in 1976, after two California wines defeated French wines in an international competition, Americans began to develop an interest in high-quality, expensive premium wines.

Winemakers are now increasingly using technology to close the gap between price and quality. Some of the most divisive new techniques in modern winemaking involve filtration technologies. For centuries, winemakers poured their product through cheesecloth to remove the seeds, stems and other residue. Modern science has taken filtration a step further, with techniques such as spinning cone columns and reverse osmosis to remove ever-smaller impurities, even down to the molecular level. Towers of stainless steel, rows of pipes and assembly lines have replaced the romantic image of winemakers stomping on their grapes in a wooden casket. Spinning cone technology works by first removing the solid particles from the liquid of the wine. Inside a steel tower, rows of plates separate the water and alcohol from the rest of the wine, leaving behind a fluid containing the flavors and aromas. A distillation tower separates the water and alcohol, and another steel container mixes together some of the water, the flavors, and the original liquid. This produces a wine with all its original aromas and flavors but with a specific alcohol and water content.

Some critics feel that these techniques destroy the wine’s character. They say that some of flavors may be lost in the process, and it throws off the natural water-sugar-alcohol balance. Bill Nelson, vice president for WineAmerica, a national trade organization, thinks that trying to engineer a wine’s composition is just the opposite of what wine-making should be. “When you take it apart and put it back together again in a different way, you have totally changed what that wine is,” he says. “Cone spinning basically tears apart the underlying notion that wine is made in a vineyard” as opposed to a laboratory. In Wine Spectator, Matt Kramer, a leading wine critic, compares the before-and-after taste of wines filtered with these techniques to that of tomatoes or sweet corn that one might buy at farmers’ market versus the vegetables sold in most supermarkets. They may look the same, but technology has dulled and distorted the taste.

Despite their detractors, winemakers are increasingly relying on these technologies.Warm, dry weather such as in California, Australia and South Africa necessitates leaving the grapes on the...