Retaining Aroma Compounds in White Wines

Dick Jones is an amateur winemaker and former professor of pulmonary medicine at the University of Alberta. Like many winemakers he noticed a pronounced loss of aroma in his white wines over the course of fermentation. This is primarily due to aroma compounds being carried away with the release of carbon dioxide. An article by May-Britt Hägg, a chemical engineer in Norway, described a membrane she had developed to scrub the carbon dioxide emissions that are released by coal-fired power plants. Jones's background in pulmonary science told him that this is what the lungs do in releasing carbon dioxide and keeping everything else in. He proceeded to experiment with adapting Hägg's device to the problem of retaining aroma compounds in wine. The result he came up with is called the AromaLoc. After some testing on his own wines, Jones partnered with a commercial wine maker to try it out on a sample of Pinot Gris. A panel of wine industry tasters in a blind tasting were unanimous in finding that the the AromaLoc samples were more aromatic. Moreover, an analysis of aroma compounds at the University of British Columbia Wine Research Centre confirmed that the treated samples had higher levels of aroma compounds. Jones has patented the AromaLoc and offered it for sale. http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/53012

Sounds like a lot of gobbly gook to me.

Sounds like a lot of gobbly gook to me.

Why? Wonder what the natural wine purists will think of this?

Fascinating.

Interesting.
Why particularly white wines- do the skins help with aroma retention?
It is interesting to ponder how this would play out as intervention or not.

I don't know that it is particularly white wines. Did it exclude reds, or is it just that the inventor is only a hobbyist with pinot gris?

Article doesn't say only for whites, should work for reds as well. But I was referring to sentence
Preserving aromatics is something many winemakers, especially those making white wine, struggle with.

I sent Jones an email asking whether a device was in the cards for use on the carboys used by home winemakers. He promptly responded that it is. Moreover, he thinks small volume fermentations will benefit most from the idea because the greater surface area/volume ratio results in a greater loss of aromatics. I asked him to please hurry since I'm not getting any younger.

Dale... maybe he thinks red wines already have enough flavor?

Dan... excellent.

Thanks for sharing the article Dan, very interesting indeed. You could try your hand at “releasing” your whites as a “Pet-Nat” (retaining a significant amount of CO2 thus not letting it “drive-out” the aromatics).

Salute

Some more from Dick Jones:

1) Trials with red wines are beginning. A lot of aromatics are lost in reds due to punching down and warm fermentation
temperatures.

2) Regarding invasiveness, nothing is added or subtracted. The procedure simply recirculates head-space gas to keep more of what
is made naturally.