Now here’s an interesting little bit of science for you.

As we all know, when you open up that lovely looking bottle of red (or white) the first thing that you notice is that unmistakable aroma. That’s not by accident, but in the process of making wine sometimes that smell turns and ends up beyond undesirable.

When the smell turns, this is call “reductive” and is about 30 percent of all wine faults. The stench can best be described as rotten eggs, and no-one wants thats. And that is all due to sulphurs in the wines.

And now, the brainiacs from the Australian Wine Research Institute and Flinders University in Australia have found that adding gold particles can remove a lot of those volatile sulphurs, in a quick and eco-friendly way.

Now, I won’t bore you with all the science, but the long and the short of it is this: gold particles bind to sulphur molecules.

In a lab, scientific sticks covered in gold nanoparticles where left in wines that had turned reductive, and after 24 hours later they found it had removed nearly half of the sulphides and the nasty smell.

Because the gold particles are essentially painted onto a surface, this innovation can easily be slipped into making wine at any point of the process. It could be during filtration or even on the inside of storage containers and decanters.

“A key benefit of the new approach is that it is easily deployable and retrievable,” says Agnieszka Mierczynska-Vasilev, a principal research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute.

“Essentially there’s a one-step process where the smart surface is added directly to the wine and then removed after a certain time period.”

Unlike the current process for reducing sulphurs is to add copper sulphates into the mix. But these come with all their own problems, such as unwanted flavours, and they need to be regulated for health reasons. Not to mention how complex and time consuming this is.

Now, of course there’s still some time until this gets out of the lab and into commercial wine making, but these early results are incredible promising for the future of wine.

Isn’t science amazing.

Salute!