(28 Oct 2018) LEADIN:
A light box, which can reveal the age, grape and production method of a wine, has been launched in Spain.
Experts say it can be used by everyone, from wine manufacturers through to amateur tasters.
STORYLINE:
Aroma, flavour and colour are normally used to identify a wine. But now there's a device which can tell us much more about its history.
A new light box has been invented to help users to see deeper into the wine and analyse it. It enables people to study the colours in the contour and centre of the wine.
Its creators say it can identify which type of grape the wine came from, how old it is and the production method used.
"'Wine Light box' is wine and light in a box. It allows you to analyse a wine regardless of what happens outside, sunny day, cloudy day, LED lamps, etc... It allows you to see the wine as it is. That is our goal. You smell the wine as it is, you taste a wine as it is. But nowadays, in restaurants, it is very complicated to see a wine as it is," says Wine Light Box inventor and General Director of Vbospagna, Enrique Leal.
The mechanism works in a way to how doctors use an x-ray. A wine glass is placed on the device and lit up by a powerful white light. The quantity and the temperature of that light can be regulated by pressing a dimmer.
After two years in the laboratory, inventors reckon that the right quality of light to properly see the colour of wine is 4,500 Kelvin degrees. Sunrise is 2,200 while high noon daylight is 5,500 Kelvin degrees.
As wine and champagne lovers, Enrique Leal and his team realised that nowadays LED lights do not enable one to analyse the chromatic values of wine.
"When you see the wine through a LED light it's terrible. The cherry red does not appear anywhere, but it exists," says Leal.
Wine tasters are always told to look for different shades of red wine, such as cherry red, ochre and amber. These colours are also used when judging wine competitions, but are not as important as things such as taste and smell.
"Over ten, the colour would have three. Olfactory and taste phases are highly valued," explains Javier Gila, Vice President of the Spanish Union of Sommelier Associations.
Gila says although restaurants might not have time to use the Light Box it will be useful for warehouse analysis and also to make wine tastings more fun and playful.
Raul Bardon, who exports Spanish wines to Asia agrees: "Up to now, tastings are always quite cold, very technical. Olfactory, gustative ... With this (instrument) you introduce a visual element with whom people seek comparison (of wines). It is more didactic and easier."
Oenologist and commercial delegate of Vivanco wine, Fernando Roman, underlines some of the advantages of Wine Light Box.
"In the same projection we can see several wines. We can even see the same wines ten years apart from one another. That is, we can compare a wine of a vintage year with the same wine of a vintage ten years later. So, we can see how that wine has evolved. And we are able to see them side by side, which is the most important thing," he says.
The portable box was designed primarily for red wines, although it's now also being tested with olive oil.
Vbospagna, the Spanish branch of an Italian light design company, commercialises it in two models which cost 180 Euros and 250 Euros each.
The product is made in Madrid.

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