Oooh! Oooh! What technology, NOT!

[Robin Garr]

I just got a breathless offer from the makers of a device called Üllo, claiming it will extract all those horrifying headache-inducing sulfites out of my wine without affecting the wine's other chemistry in any way. WOW! They'll even sign me up for an affiliate program and give me a cut of sales. What a deal!

What do you think I should say to them? (My actual plan: Ignore the heck out of 'em.)

https://ullowine.com/

Ignoring them is the best policy, IMO. But they have a potential customer born every minute.

As an armchair biochemist I'd love to know what their filtration mechanism is.

And their fundamental idea is flawed. Sulfite can cause headaches and respiratory problems, sometimes severe, for a small number of people sensitive to it. Those who get bad reactions to sulfite know who they are and what to avoid. I personally have a mild reaction to sulfite. I sometimes get some tightness in the throat after eating fast food french fries (they are sprinkled with sulfite to prevent the raw cut potatoes turning brown as they wait to be fried). But I've never had any reaction to the levels of sulfite present in wine. The FDA started requiring "contains sulfites" on wine labels back in 1987, allegedly to warn the sulfite-sensitive, but that was just an excuse by neo-prohibitionists to pursue their anti-alcohol agenda by scaring the ignorant.

So this product is based on a fundamentally bogus premise and very likely a mechanism that plain doesn't work.

-Paul W.

Ignoring them is the best policy, IMO. But they have a potential customer born every minute.

As an armchair biochemist I'd love to know what their filtration mechanism is.

And their fundamental idea is flawed. Sulfite can cause headaches and respiratory problems, sometimes severe, for a small number of people sensitive to it. Those who get bad reactions to sulfite know who they are and what to avoid. I personally have a mild reaction to sulfite. I sometimes get some tightness in the throat after eating fast food french fries (they are sprinkled with sulfite to prevent the raw cut potatoes turning brown as they wait to be fried). But I've never had any reaction to the levels of sulfite present in wine. The FDA started requiring "contains sulfites" on wine labels back in 1987, allegedly to warn the sulfite-sensitive, but that was just an excuse by neo-prohibitionists to pursue their anti-alcohol agenda by scaring the ignorant.

So this product is based on a fundamentally bogus premise and very likely a mechanism that plain doesn't work.

-Paul W.

If I were to design a device to remove sulfites from wine, it wouldn't involve filtration but rather oxidation. Selective oxidation of bisulfite to bisulfate would render it harmless, but of course that's why it's there in the first place: to oxidize instead of the flavor components of the wine.

Tell them to send you a sample for free so you can check it out and report to all your wine friends if it works.