Turning $3 Wine into a $100 Vintage with Science!

Hi, I think you're really going to find this interesting. Over the years, we have done a number of videos on fermentation and distillation. We've fermented some sugary liquids like apple juice or molasses. And we have distilled some of these into higher potency beverages like whiskey and rum. We've even extracted essential oils from lemons. And what's interesting is once you have a handle on the principles and you have a little experience with the techniques, you can expand your horizons and look at applying it to different types of projects. And that's what we're going to do now. When you ferment a sugary liquid like apple juice or molasses or grapes, the sugar in the fruit which is used to essentially spread the genetics around the world because it encourages animals and insects to eat them. You can just add some yeast, some water, put it in a fermenttor, and in a week or 10 days or so, you have converted that sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a variety of other interesting flavors. When you try to ferment something like a grain like corn, barley, or in our most recent video, rice, if you add that grain to a pot of water, yeast, it won't work. The reason it doesn't is because for evolutionary purposes, the seeds contain an energy store that allows them to do the early phases of growth, put down their little roots, their little sprouts, and they store that energy in the form of starch. Now, starch is effectively sugar. It's just sugar molecules that are linked in very long linear and branching chains. There's a reason for that. Because that starch is not water soluble. It doesn't rinse away and it's more resistant to microbial growth, bacterial growth, and yeast. Yeast can't eat starch because it can't cleave those individual sugar molecules apart in order to be able to do the conversion. What's interesting though is the plant can't either. And so what happens is in the very early phases of its growth, it will begin to generate an enzyme amalayise that can cleave those starch molecules up into sugar to make it available to the plant. So when you're trying to ferment a grain, you have to go through an initial process called molting. You'll fool the seeds. What you'll do is you'll place the seeds in a warm, moist environment. It thinks it's got a place to grow. It will begin to put out little roots and little sprouts. And then after a couple of days, you'll dry it. In that inert initial 2 days or so, it will also begin to generate an enzyme, an amalayise enzyme that can cleave all of those sugar molecules out of the starch to make it available to the plant. Once you've stopped the growth process, you still have that amalayise. It doesn't destroy them. So now when you take the molted grain and you place it into a container with yeast and water, you can ferment it. What's interesting is because amalayise like a catalyst is a chemical machine. It actually isn't consumed in the process. It can degrade but it isn't used up in each reaction. And so one amalayise molecule can effectively catalyze a number of starch cleavings. And so you can actually throw grains into the pot along with the molted grain and the amalayise will chew through everything. It's a great technique. Now in our most recent video where we did the sake, one of the problems with sake or making sake is the fact that the seed itself is surrounded to protect it with a little cellulose, protein, and fatty acids. And these can add an off flavor to the sake. So, the rice that you're going to be using to make sake is polished. They actually take the rice, they put it in an araider, and they grind away or they peel away all of the outer layers, leaving the inner core of starch. The problem is you also remove the system that can generate an amalayise. You can't malt rice. So you use a process, an initial process that involves a mold or a fungus, aspiggillis orsai. You'll take the rice, the polished rice, you'll steam it, you'll cook it to gelatinize the starch, to hydrate it so that it makes it more available. And then you will sprinkle on top of it this mold.

And what you're going to be doing is allowing the mold to process that starch. It can produce the amalayise enzyme and after a couple of days what you've made is called cooji rice. It's delicious. It has a slight tang to it. It's a little bit like cream cheese and it's very sweet. This then can be put into water, add yeast, and you can make sake. Well, what occurred to me is what if we took that same process? It's the autumn. We've got lots of pumpkins around. What if we took pumpkins, cooked them, and then made pumpkin cooji? Not pumpkin flavored cooji, actually made the cooji out of pumpkin and then processed that to make pumpkin sake. I think it's going to be an interesting video and you can see a few of the uh examples of the experiments that we've been having making the pumpkin cooji. It does work. At the same time, we looked at the distillation process and I thought, what could we do to make that more interesting or maybe use it for a different application? One of the problems you have when you malt, then ferment, and then you throw this dilute looking oatmeal into the bottom of these containers in order to be able to do the distillation. It's a lot of additional steps. And what I thought about is what if we just took a commercially available fermented beverage like wine, cheap wine, and we were to distill that effectively, we'll make brandy. No secret about that. That's how brandy is made. So that's not really that noteworthy and probably not worth a video. But if you're familiar with the foodie culture, there is a I don't know if it's a fad, but it's a process called disassembling. You basically take, say, a big bowl of chicken soup, and rather than serving the person the bowl of soup, you'll serve them the cooked carrots, the potatoes with parsley on them, some meat, and some clarified broth. It may be a fad, but it is a great way for you to be able to detect what the different characteristics are of the components in the finished dish. Well, what if we did the same thing with the wine? We disassemble it into a large number of individual components and then if we were to just put everything back together again after the distillation, we would basically reconstruct the wine, which would be a waste of time. But if we taste those components and we find something in there that we don't like, something that's sour and musty and it just doesn't add anything to the quality, we exclude it from the final mix. Is it possible we could take wine that costs about $3 a bottle equivalent and turn it into something that maybe is costing $100 a bottle or more? Could we really improve the flavor with this process? Now, when you do distillation, the way it works is that when you heat the liquid, the very first things that begin to evaporate are the most volatile. If you're making your own fermentation and you're using, say, grains that have some cellulose or cellulose like molecules in them, you will produce methanol, wood alcohol. It's toxic. You don't want that. So, the very first things that come out of the still, you throw away. But then after that you have what are called the head, the heart and the tail. And these are segments of the distillation that represent the most volatile, the high alcohol content in the heads and the most flowery, the most uh um floral types of flavors. Then you get into the hearts, which is really what everybody is looking for. And then as you move further into the lower volatility materials, you get into what's starting to get a little bit earthy, a little musty, and eventually kind of funky. And then you cut it off. Then you blend the hearts, the heads, and maybe a little bit into the tails to produce the final beverage for aging or drinking, whatever you want to do with it. Well, we don't have any methanol in the wine. So that makes that easy. And so all we really need to do is distill it, separate it, and then recombine it in potentially a much better wine. There's two big deal killers with this. Number one, wine does not like oxygen. If you oxidize the wine, you will remove some of the lighter, more floral characteristics of the wine. It's not good. And there's a lot of oxygen available in a free dis still like that. The other thing is wine does not like heat. Some of the esters and the aldahhides that produce a lot of the flavor are destroyed by temperatures above about 60 to 70° C. So if we were to do the distillation, we would end up having a really lousy tasting wine. And if you doubt me, you can do a little

experiment at home. Take a bottle of wine, pour half of it into a pot, put it on the stove, boil it for a couple of minutes, put the lid on, let it cool back down to the temperature of the original bottle, and then taste them. You'll notice it's kind of muted. It's kind of flat. It doesn't have a lot of flavor to it. And this may be one of the reasons why they add so many spices when you're making mold wine, because the wine wouldn't taste that good if you warm it up. The way we can deal with this is to use science. We're going to do what's called a vacuum distillation. Now, a vacuum distillation is very commonly used in chemistry. If you've gone through any kind of chemistry training, I'm sure you've probably done them. And typically, what's involved is exactly what happens in a typical still, just like this apparatus I have over here. I'll pick this up so you can kind of get a view of what I'm talking about here. But effectively, you put your predistillate in a container which is going to be heated and then it passes through a condenser to cool it off and then it drips into these containers so that you can separate out the individual components. The key difference is this thing that I'm going to point with my chin is the barb that allows you to evacuate this to remove all of the air. When you do that, you obviously have taken care of the first problem that we have with distillation is oxygen. there's no oxygen to oxidize the wine. The second advantage is the fact that when you lower air pressure, you decrease the boiling point of the liquids. If I was to say to you, what's the boiling point of water? You'd say 100° C at sea level. But if you go up in altitude and the air pressure drops, the boiling point drops. I remember a couple of years ago, I was looking at the back of a Riceland rice box. I didn't find it this time. I think they took it off. But basically, they gave you cooking instructions that were modified for altitude. So, if you're at sea level, 15 minutes. If you're at 1,000 or 2,000 m, maybe 18 minutes. Because at that altitude, the water might boil at 90 to 95° C, and it takes longer to cook it. Similarly, if you have a pressure cooker, you pressurize the inside of the container and the boiling point may go up 10 or 20° and vastly increase the speed of the cooking. Incidentally, I've never had anything out of a pressure cooker I liked, but the principle is still the same. If we reduce the pressure enough, we can actually get water to boil at room temperature. Let me demonstrate this. Over here, I have a small flask of pure water. It's hooked up to a vacuum pump. I'm going to turn on the pump and watch what happens. This is room temperature. Keep an eye on this. Pretty neat, huh? Just want to give a very good view to the camera. Now, one thing you'll notice in the bottom of this container are these ceramic boiling beads. The reason that they will use this in any kind of a distillation or a boiling is simply because they have a huge surface area and they tend to induce smaller bubbles. So, we get a more even, smoother boiling. If you go online or you talk to some chemistry professors, they'll tell you these don't work for a vacuum distillation. They do. And I'll explain the mechanism, so it makes sense in just a sec. But nevertheless, these have nothing to do with the boiling process other than to make it a little bit more successful. Now, the problem with doing a distillation with this kind of equipment is this is expensive. This costs several hundred and might be able to handle 100 milliliters or so. So, not really worthwhile. So, what I'm going to show you is how to build a very large capacity, very high-performance vacuum distillation system that doesn't cost much. Almost everything you see on the table, you can get from Amazon. And we'll put a list of a few of the pertinent components in the description below the video. What it starts out with is a pot. This is where we're going to put the wine before we do the distillation. Now, there's a couple of companies that make this. Vivore is one and there's another one that has a very weird pronunciation. It's like bang. That's the one that we're using here and they just put the BAC on it. But it's essentially a very heavy duty cooking pot with a nicely rolled rim up here. And then you have a

gasket and either a tempered glass or an acrylic top. And the reason these things are made is primarily to degass plasters and resins if you're going to be doing molding operations. Nevertheless, this actually achieves a pretty darn good vacuum and it's a great cost-effective way to handle large volumes at a vacuum. You can get them all the way from half a liter up to, I think, 30 L. And even the biggest one will cost you about $200. This is about $100. So, it's not very expensive. Now, when you get this, you can get them with a vacuum pump. Stay away from those. They're junk. But you'll also get some fittings. This is a little vacuum fitting that goes into there for the resin process. And some completely unknown kind of sketchy tubing. Stay away from this. Save this for another project. You don't want to use this. Everything you want to use in this process needs to be food grade because obviously we're going to be drinking this stuff. So, one of the difficulties is that there's a little port that they drilled in the back of this to allow their fitting to fit in there. But, we need larger diameter ports. We need more access for more leads. And so I drilled some holes. Now, at first you might think it's no big deal, but drilling into a curved stainless steel pot like this can be a little bit challenging. So there's a trick. When you have a location where you want to put a hole, just take a little punch and put a little divot in the middle so that you'll center it. And then a little twist drill. It could be couple of millimeters in diameter just to cause or form a little initial hole. Then get a hold of, if you don't already even have them, a step drill. These are kind of nice because, as you can see, they've got gradations in diameter. So, as you plunge deeper and deeper, the hole enlarges to very specific diameters. It's very convenient. And if you want an intermediate diameter, you can actually get a tapered step drill like this that doesn't have any set steps. It's a very flexible way of cutting and it cuts very well in curved, very tough materials like stainless steel. Then just a file to get rid of the burrs and you're pretty much done. So that's how we drilled the additional holes that I'm going to be using for the demonstration. In addition, now that we have the holes, the easiest, cheapest way to plug them is with a stopper, just like I have over here. Now, you want to use high temperature foodgrade silicone stoppers again for food contact. And these are great, but they often come without any holes. They're much less common than the typical Buuna N or rubber stoppers you might get from the hardware store. You don't want to use those. Plasticizers, things will out gas. Stay away from them. High temperature silicone. And for some of these things like I'm going to describe, if you can't find it on Amazon, you can get this from common industrial supply houses like McMaster car. These other components that I'll identify, you can obtain them there. Now, one of the problems with these is because they're rare, it's hard to find them with the right hole diameter to fit your application. You're probably going to need to drill them. And that can be a bit of a hassle because if you try to hold this in your hand like this and take a drill to it, first of all, you're probably going to injure yourself because this rubber will grab onto the twist drill bit. So, not so good. And if you try to put this in a vise, you can imagine because it's tapered like this, it doesn't hold it very well, and you will ellipseize it or distort it. So, the hole that you put through is not going to be round either. So, here's the little trick. Grab a short length of any kind of pipe, plastic or metal, doesn't matter, that will fit the stopper that you want to drill. You jam this in the end. Then you put this in the vise. The neat thing about this is as you press in and it the drill wants to grab this, you're actually pushing it tighter into the tube so it won't slip. The other trick is that expect that the diameter of the drill that you use is going to have to be a lot bigger than you think. If say you have a 6 millimeter or quarter inch hose barb you want to put into there, you grab a 6 millimeter or quarter inch drill. You put it in there and there's no way you're going to get this in there because this is soft. It gives and so the hole that you put in with the drill is always end going to end up being smaller. So you can start out with the same diameter but then have several slightly larger gradations of drill that you can put in until you get a nice firm fit. This is a neat technique and you can use it for any kind of stoppers. It doesn't have to be the food grade type, but it's a great way of drilling holes. And that's what I did to fabricate this. Now, the first thing you'll see coming out of the side of this, I'm going to move this back just a little bit so it's a little easier to see. Let me see if I can actually I'll move it like this. — If you can angle it that way, — like this. — Yep. — Easier. Good. Little fitting. This is pretty much common sense. Everything is

316 to 316 or 304 stainless steel. Uh, and the fittings in all of this are either teflon or high temperature food grade silicone, just as a reference. Once we get down here, this is one of the first things that you're going to have to get probably from an industrial supply house. This is a stainless steel vacuum gauge and the internals are all teflon. So again, completely food safe, food safe silicone tubing that goes to again another stainless steel uh fitting into this container here. This is a small version of this. Like I said, they come in all different dimensions and sizes. This one though has an acrylic top, so I was able to drill and tap into here three holes. one to feed the gas that's coming out of here, one for a pressure gauge, and one for the other expensive valve, which is this one here. Unlike the two-way valve over here, this is a three-way valve. This allows us to evacuate the system using the vacuum pump. And then when we're in the process of doing the distillation and I want to get some of this liquid out of here, what I simply do is close off this system, maintain the vacuum, then I turn this valve to purge it so I can get the lid off, pour out the liquid like this. And as you can see in the bottom here, there is this little piece of stainless steel. See that moving around? The only purpose for this is a spacer. It just gives me a height and I know what the quantity is in here. You could just as easily scratch the inside with measurements if you wanted to, but this works well and it's very convenient. So [clears throat] now that we have the vacuum system here or the vacuum setup, the pump, we have probably a dozen vacuum pumps in our lab, in our warehouse, and many of them are very high performance, very high vacuum, but they are all based on an oil bath that provides the seal to get the very low pressures. Uh an example of one of these pumps is like this one down here. Achieves a super duper vacuum that we have another one over there. We've got them all over the place. You can get them online. You do not want to use an oil sealed pump with any of this type of process because there can be a little bit of retrograde flow of the oil into the system. You want to avoid that. So, what we have here is a diaphragm pump again from Amazon. I think this is about $140. But what's interesting is a diaphragm pump does not achieve a very good vacuum. So, what they did is they installed a two-stage system, pre and then post. And this thing can get below a hundth of an atmosphere. Produces an excellent vacuum. As you can see when I demonstrated the boiling of the liquid. This then is hooked up to the system and does all the evacuation that we need to do. Once we're finished uh doing a distillation, we are doing the initial outgassing of the material. We almost don't need the pump anymore. The seals are so good here. They will work for hours without any additional evacuation, which is kind of neat. Now, the condensation we want to condense inside this container requires that this is as cold as possible because if we're distilling at 25, 30, 34° C, in order to get that vapor to become a liquid, we need to get this really cold. That's why I re uh assigned this chest freezer. We used this in a previous video years ago, I think, with that still, but it still works very well. What you do is you get a chest freezer and to make sure that it doesn't leak. It'll hold a quantity of water. What we do is we just take some of that rubber seal that you can get at the hardware store. It just sprays out. Looks like hairspray, but it forms a thick rubbery coating that then cures to provide a watertight seal. And this thing works perfectly. It doesn't leak at all. You fill it up with water to whatever height that you're going to be operating at. And then you can turn it on a day or two ahead of time. And what you're going to be doing is not only refrigerating the water down to freezing, but you're going to begin producing some ice. And that's the key because as long as there is some ice along with the water, the temperature will stay almost always at 0° C except for some variations just due to turbulence. And what's also nice is you can dump a huge amount of heat into here because you've stored up a lot of cold, so to speak. So, you don't need the capacity of the unit to be anything like stills that you use. One problem I discovered though is that inside of here, you get a lot of um layering of temperature. The ice forms at the bottom and the top can be as much as 5 7 8° C warmer even though it's in the same bath. So, inside of here there's a small 15watt $9 Amazon

submersible fish pump. And I'm just going to plug this thing in. And you'll get to see the turbulence in there. And this will bring the liquid up from the bottom, circulate it underneath. This makes a very, very effective way of keeping this cool. The other modification you'll see is this little bracket. This is simply sized to fit the container. So, whatever chest freezer you have, you have to make it that wide. At the bottom is an aluminum plate that I b a hole in, but the hole is slightly smaller than the top of this container. So, when I place this inside of the liquid, I can jam this into the hole and it doesn't pop up. It doesn't float. So, it's easy to put the lid on and it's not messy and I'm not spilling my contents. This works very well. In addition, I have a thermal probe that plugs into here and then I have a thermal pro probe that goes into the pot to tell us what the temperature is. Now, one of the things you'll notice is this looks a little strange. That's because these very inexpensive temperature probes come with these leads. I guess that's the best way to describe it. It's a thermalouple on a wire lead. And the lead is two very fine wires inside of a glass or a fiber sheath to protect it. But as a result, no matter how tight the stopper is that you go through it, it's still going to leak on either side of the leads. You can't get a vacuum tight seal. So the simple solution is you cut the lead a little bit above the probe. You strip the ends and then you take one of these stoppers that you fabricated and you drill two holes in it. The two holes then allow you to take some steel I'm using uh 440 uh steel stainless steel screws that have a smooth component on them. They're not threaded all the way to the top. They are then jammed into the stopper and then I've attached the wires to each side. So now I have a vacuum tight feed through for my temperature probe which is going to sit inside of here. Now, a couple of other things before we begin the first distillation. This [clears throat] you're probably wondering about this thing. Remember when I said that the boiling point of water is dependent on the air pressure above it? It's actually more than it is on the water itself. The problem is that's not completely accurate because what's keeping those bubbles which are forming at the hottest point often above the flame or the heating element from expanding is the combination of the air pressure one atmosphere at sea level plus the hydrostatic pressure of the liquid inside the container. When you're reducing the air pressure so much, the hydrostatic pressure becomes the dominant pressure that's preventing the liquid from boiling. As those tiny bubbles begin to rise toward the surface, they expand exponentially and they can sort of explode at the surface and it creates a phenomenon called bumping. It's literally something you can hear. Those bubbles when they expand so much, they can actually drive the liquid all around the inside of the boiling chamber and even cause some of the liquid to get down into the ports or the lines. So, you don't want that to happen. That's one reason the boiling beads still do have a positive effect if you're using them inside of a vacuum distillation because they induce smaller bubbles which are going to produce smaller bumps, but it's still a problem. So, I built this. This is a structure. It's sort of a bump guard. And I've designed it with these studs so that when we fill this with the 5 L of wine, the wine will be slightly below the upper surface. So, when the wine bumps, it's going to hit this. This will break up and really reduce the velocity so it doesn't fly up to the top part of the container. I added a second one just in case because as the wine goes down, I still wanted to have some surface above here rather than letting it have more space uh in order to expand. This is probably not necessary, but I did it anyway. And then stainless steel, stainless steel, everything. Now, one problem with this, you can't buy them. You have to make them. And if you obtain some stainless steel mesh like this, like I did, this is what I made it from. You're going to find that this stuff is really difficult to cut. If you try to cut a circle out of this thing on say a band saw because it's not perfectly flat. It often has a little bit of a twist or a bow to it. This can catch in any of the features of the top of your

saw which can cause a kind of uneven cut. But also because the edges are very rough, you can end up grabbing your glove and it can be a safety issue. So there's a trick to making this. What you do is grab some particle board or some MDF and cut out a couple of squares that are slightly larger than you're going to end up wanting to use. Then mark the center, scribe a circle and the points where your studs are going to be going through. Then take a regular jigsaw, something you just put on a saworse or on a table, and cut a couple of squares of the stainless steel and sandwich it. Now, when you put this in the band saw in order to be able to make the cut, it's easy and it's safe. It's a very effective way of doing this. This stuff comes greasy. You really need to clean this stuff off. It's probably in the punching process that they use a lot of oil. First thing is take it to a sink, scrub it off, get the bulk of that off with some soap and water. Then take a pot similar to one of these, put it in the bottom, throw some acetone in it, leave it there for a while, and scrub it a few times before you bring it back to the sink to clean this off. You really want to get rid of the oil. That's pretty much it for the bump guard. It also, because of the sharp edges, provides some of the surface area of the boiling beads, which helps a lot in the fabrication. You don't have to add more steps. Now, when I slip this in, I have to remove all the stoppers. One last thing to mention about the boiling pot. You'll notice there's a band around the outside here, similar to the bands on this still over here. Band heaters instead of a heater underneath. This serves a couple of purposes. In that kind of a still, you tend to get a lot of debris that goes to the bottom. You don't want to scorch it. So, heating from the side is a good advantage. The reason for doing it here is if the heat source is closer to the surface by the walls than a heat source at the bottom, the bumping again is going to be reduced because they don't have as much headroom. time to expand. They're going to be smaller. So, we're using a band heater here. And the only reason we even need heat is because the evaporation process extracts a lot of energy. It takes energy to turn the liquid into a vapor. And so, this would continually cool off. it actually refrigerate under a vacuum. So, we're adding heat not to get this hot, but to provide the heat that we're going to be losing in the evaporation process. So, we're only going to run this at about 200 watts. And this will become warmish, about body temperature, but that's about it. And the reason for the stand is not thermal. It just means that when we're all done, it's easy to simply tip this over and get whatever residual is out of it because the thing tends to be very tethered. So, let me go ahead and start putting a few parts together before I explain the last setup here. We'll get the stoppers in now that I have the guard in there. I'm going to stop struggling here. Let's take this one out and do this first. You want these tight. Good. This one better fit this one. And then the temperature probe. Feed this down into the bottom and put this stopper in. Good. Okay, now we're ready for the wine. Now, I've already taken about 500 milliliters out of this to keep as a reference sample when we do our tasting to compare the final with the initial. But now we're going to add the wine to this. — Can you uh turn the — like this? — Okay, everybody can see this. Smells pretty good even though this is about $3 a bottle. And this isn't a bad wine. It's surprising because it is a box wine. It's not bad. It's not that good, but it's not as bad as you might think. Come on, old man.

Don't you hate that? I can hear there's some in there and I don't want to throw it away, but I could be doing this for a while. All right, there's probably a couple of tablespoons left, so we'll just leave that. Now, before I close this up, there's another little thing that you have to do. This is the lid that's going to go on the top. And in order to get a very good seal, what you want to do is add grease. And you want to use a food safe grease. This is used for lubricating say kitchen appliances or um say meat slicers, that sort of thing. You could eat it. You don't necessarily want to, but it's safe. It's non-toxic. So again, food contact, that's what we're going to use. And the trick is, I put this in a syringe just to make it a little bit easier, but what you're going to do is effectively you're going to run a bead of grease along the side that's actually going to contact the pot. You don't have to get the other side, the top, because there's no pressure. There's no seal necessary, but this is where you need the seal. So, I'm just going to start this like this so you can see it. And then I'll finish it horizontally because it'll be a little easier for me. But you just put a layer of this grease all the way around like and keep going. I can you I'll put that more to your right. — Yeah. Perfect. This isn't difficult and you only need to do this at the beginning of an operation. This will be good for a few weeks. It doesn't dry out very quickly. And then the gloves. Go ahead and give this a little shmear just to make sure that we're contacting the area that's going to be under compression on the rim. Then same thing here. This is pretty important actually. I don't want any water here or any wine. so we get a good seal. And then we'll just put a bead of this around the edge. These are the two points where the air could go in inside the gasket and underneath the gasket. And don't worry that I'm not doing a super good job because it's not necessary. We just have to distribute it a little bit here. And then a little shmear. Nice. Now we'll go ahead and put this surface, the one that I greased, down like this. Get it centered. Then I'm going to steal my vacuum pump hose from the demo. I'm going to hook this up to here. And then I've already greased the inside of this one. I didn't necessarily need to show you that twice, but we're going to put a little bit of grease along here. And this grease will stay even when we open this up and close it dozens of times. It'll stay greasy enough to give you an excellent seal. I'll just give that a little bit of a shmear, too. Very good. Now, let's go ahead and put the pot in the cooler. There we go. And now the lid on top of that. sure it's pretty centered. Then I'm going to turn the valve to the pump and we're going to begin pumping down. Now, right now, the vacuum has improved substantially because I'm not evacuating this yet. Yeah, that backed us up a little bit. Now, for the first 15, maybe even 20 minutes

not much is going to happen. And the vacuum is actually not going to be that impressive because the first 15 or 20 minutes is the degassing of the wine, getting rid of all the air that's been in the wine since it was manufactured. We have to get rid of that before we can get down to pressures that will affect the distillation. I'm then going to turn the power supply up on this varia to get the heater going and I'm going to turn it to 200 W. That's a little high there. Yeah, that's pretty good. Still a little high. Perfect. Okay. So, while this is slowly beginning to warm up, the outgassing is continuing and we're down to about a fifth of an atmosphere, 20% of atmospheric pressure. Still not nearly enough to get anything to boil, but as the gases leave, as the air leaves, this pressure will continue to drop, and we will eventually start to get some condensate forming inside of the basin. This could take 15 to 20 minutes to begin. And then each one of the steps involved is probably going to take about 45 minutes. We'll get into that in just a little bit. Okay. So, we're going to show you a shot inside of there, but we've probably got about 15 ml of distillate in there. If you take a look on the camera, you can see this is the upper temperature of the inside of here, which is still, you can detect it's slightly warm, but barely. And this is the temperature of the ice bath. These things aren't perfect, so it's probably off by about one degree Celsius. And it says 1. 4. And the vacuum is still pretty much unchanged. And we haven't had the pump on for maybe half an hour. So, pretty impressive. Let's see what happens when we fill this up. And I'll show you the transfer process next. Okay, it's been about 45 minutes. Let's take a look at what we achieved. Yeah, it's plenty full. So, what I'm going to do is turn off the pot. So, now it's isolated. Then, I'm going to purge the vacuum here. [snorts] Take off the lid. Take out the pot. And I don't know if you're going to be able to see this. Um I don't know if this is very visible. Yeah, you can uh lift it up a little bit more and rotate it more. — Yeah, rotate. Just keep rotating. — Yeah, that's good. You're spilling — precious. — The precious stuff. Okay. So, put my finger on the spacer. Good. Push this back in. We go. Put the lid back on. And turn on the vacuum. Now, incidentally, I don't know if you can see this, but the temperature of the pot is at 30. 8° C. So, still well below body temperature and a little above a comfortable room temperature. Yeah, feels kind of good. And the temperature of the water bath is at 1. 5° C. We have our vacuum pretty close to where we want it. I'm going to give it another 30 seconds. But I mean, come on. You got to, right? Smells good. Oh, that's strong. This is probably about 98% 95% ethanol. So, it's about 180 proof. But it's good. Tastes good. All right. So, seal this thing off. Open this thing up. And this guy never knew that this was closed because it was such a brief period of time. And you're going to be doing this approximately every 45

minutes for a total of about 12 hours if we're going to be able to pull out a total of 4 1/2 L. So, I got my work cut out for me. You'll see in a little bit. I'm going to run one more of these drainages just to give you an idea of the process and what it looks like and the consistency of it. And I'm just looking over to see if you can see any evidence of the bumping. Actually, you can. Let me turn this guy off cuz you're not really doing anything. I don't know if we can hear it. All right. How we doing? This was a little bit of a longer gap, so I may have a little more in there. I don't know if you can hear this, but I'm going to put my mic near this so that you can hear the flow through the narrow orifice of the valve. Hear that hissing? And then maybe you can hear the bumping. Okay, I'm going to close this valve. The hissing goes off. Now I'm going to purge this. [snorts] Take the lid off. Do another sample cup. Smells wonderful. All right, this is a fairly large cut. Put this guy back in. Jam it into position. Put the lid back on. close the valve or open it to vacuum basically. [snorts] Now, you can't see this, but the valve is going to or the pressure gauge is going down about this fast. We're almost down to the same vacuum. We'll give it another 10 seconds. You can also hear the sound quality of this changes a little bit as you get to a higher vacuum. Good. Now, open this up and you'll probably hear the hiss again. Let's take a look. Yep. Starting to flow. All right, let's give this a taste. Still very potent, but it has a really nice flavor and a nice aroma. This is going to be fun, but it's going to be a lot of work. So, I'm going to be at this for probably about 9 more hours. And then what we're going to do is we're going to gather together all of these individual cuts. And then Alex and I are going to sit down and we're going to do some selective culling of the cuts to figure out what we want to f finally blend in. And then we're going to test this against some pretty high-end wines just to see if in fact we can beat them. So I'll see you a little bit later or actually a lot later from my point of view. Take care. Okay, now for the moment of truth and the actual fun of the video. What we've done is I spent about the last 14 hours doing the distillation. And as I explained, it's a slow process because you want to make lots of individual cuts in order to have the best chance of excluding the stuff that you don't want if we can find anything that we don't want. The other thing that you'll probably notice is that almost all of the early cuts all the way to the last part that was taken out of the pot is almost colorless. The color in the wine is not volatile. So, I could possibly have cut this down, this container right here a little bit further, but I didn't see much advantage and I was getting pretty tired. The other thing is the volumes in some of these containers varies a little bit. That wasn't by design. It's simply a matter of if you're doing this for a long period of time, maybe you're eating dinner, you're watching a good YouTube video or something and so it goes a little bit longer and then the one before it was a little bit shorter. But in essence, the division, even though it's not perfectly to the same volume

still does a separation based on most volatile, highest alcohol, all the way down to the least volatile, no alcohol. And what we're going to be doing with this test is Alex and I Yeah. And uh I just have to interrupt. I was also tired because I normally do all the filming and so everything that he's doing I'm behind the camera and I'm sitting there making sure that it's all in focus and so the reason I'm here and the camera that we're looking at I'm having to monitor uh monitor I'm making sure that you know obviously uh it goes well but also I'm going to be doing the uh taste testing as well. I got to hit more than one opinion and I couldn't — recruit anybody else uh for this test here, but I don't think we're going to need to. What we're going to do to start out with is a first run through all of our cuts just to get a feeling for what's going on, but we're not going to make a final determination. Then we're going to do a second run through all of these cuts and we're going to try to agree on what we shouldn't include in the final mix. And then when we're all done making what we think is the best version of that Franzia Cabernet, we're going to go ahead and we're going to test it against some of the material that I retained from the box before we ever began. So, this is straight from the box, plus various commercial cabernets of different price points, starting with the cupcake, which you might guess is the least expensive at around $7 or $8 a bottle all the way up to almost $100 a bottle uh for the bottle to the farthest right. And we're going to see, can we beat the original? And if so, can we get to equivalent or better than some of the higher price wines? That's what we're going to be testing today. So, we'll start out with a sample of the most volatile number one. And I'm not going to give us too much of this, but and a little warning, Al, this is going to be really hot in terms of alcohol content. — I would assume — except that part of it, but what I was going to suggest is see if you can tell that there's any kind of a floral or any other component overlying that. Sure. Okay. Here's yours. All right. Here we go. Cheers. Man, that's strong. — Yeah, that's rough. — But it's actually good. — Like I like the flavor. If you can get past the like the hot burning alcohol component. — Yeah. It's not a bad flavor. — Okay. All right. Sounds good. — It's okay. — All right. So, let's go ahead. We're going to dump this. I'll do the same. — Yeah. And we're now going to go to sample number two. And obviously, I ran out of one type of bottle. So, we do a mix match, but there's no meaning to the different types of bottles. They're effectively the same. — You should probably rinse your mouth out, though. — Yeah, I think I will before I do the next taste. I suspect this is going to be pretty similar. There you go. Thank you. — It's got a nice smell. — It's not as harsh. — No. And it does have a little bit more flavor, too. — You can tell it's not just alcohol. I like the smell though. It's a pleasant aroma. — Very similar though. — Yeah, obviously — not much of a change. — All right, so let's do our dump. I'm going to take your advice. — Yeah, you should. Yeah, — it's going to be a long afternoon, but a fun one. Can't have much more fun than this science, right? All right, number three. — It's nice that you're doing all the work for me. I just have to taste stuff. — Yeah. — Well, I deserve a tip when we're done. All right. Same sort of aroma. Definitely more flavor. — Yeah. You can feel the alcohol going down and whatever floral component there is like coming — almost getting into your nose a little bit more.

— Yeah. Not just burning your throat when it's going down. — Right. Yeah. I wonder how filled up that's We're going to find some dead chipmunks in there tomorrow. All right. Yeah, I should do this. Just to be fair. — Yeah. All right. Number four. One thing I have to mention though is I'm not tasting anything from the process. In other words, I'm not tasting like funny metallic tastes or, you know, rubbery tastes or anything. So, the equipment that was used is not contributing anything to this. Much stronger aroma, but a different flavor. It's almost a little bit more like um kind of like a cherry or something like that. Like it's kind of a tart fruity, but it doesn't taste like wine. — Yeah, I agree. wine, but it's to me it's not quite as strong. Um but — you mean the alcohol or the floral flavor? Yeah. Like Yeah. It's — I don't It's more lax. Like you uh you would get it as like almost a you mix this into a seltzer. — Yeah. You might almost think this is like a shabli. It's almost like a white wine. It's got a wine flavor, but it's that lighter sort of more fruity, less heavy cherry plum apricot kind of flavor. It's not bad. All right. I don't remember if I rinsed this, but I better just check it. All right. Number five. Now, imagine if I did 30 cuts. You see the problem with that? And — this is unedited, by the way. It may be later. We'll see. Yes. Oifer. You smell that? It's a nice Yeah, I like it a lot more than the other ones, — but very little alcohol. Now, I would almost say this has got less alcohol than like a typical wine. Like it tastes like you can taste the — maybe 9%. — Yeah. — Like that's what it tastes like. I'm not saying that's what it is. — There's some alcohol in it, but it's really light. — All right, number six. Hand it over. — Keep going. — Let's keep it up. I have another one. This time I'll remember. All right. There you go. All right. Aroma first. I can tell you right now, I don't even think I have to run through all of them. Um, yeah, it just tastes like watered down I wouldn't say vodka, but watered down. I don't even know. — Tastes like water I'd have in my bed stand for two days. You know what I mean? It's just like stale water. — Yeah. — With a slight — tinge of something else. — Yeah. But you can't even identify it. — Yep. — Yeah. — Yeah. That one's probably not going to make the grade. — All right. Number seven. We're almost halfway through the first run. God, I love science. Don't you? Well, uh, now I — You're liking it more and more. — Yeah. — Very similar to six. — Yeah. — But if anything, I would say it's weaker, but it still has that same kind of odd stale flavor. — Yeah, — I agree.

— Like, it's so weak. It almost tastes like the last thing that you ate or something. — Yeah. Yesterday. All right. Eight. I'm always paranoid that I didn't do that. So, probably did it twice. All right. Oh, that's a different aroma. It's almost — It smells better. — Spicy. Yeah. — But it's almost like, you know, sugarfree salt water or something. — Bay leaves. I'm tasting almost like a spice like bay leaves or — oregano or some — Yeah. something a little more gentle. Maybe like a thyme. It's almost like And all of it comes from grapes. That's the weirdest thing. All these different flavors. — Yep. — Yeah. All right, moving on up. Nine. This time I'm going to remember. All right. — That's funny. There's no flavor. It's just bitter. — Yeah. But the smell is more to me is more similar to the previous ones. — Yeah, it's stronger in that sort of spicy nature, but there's almost no like mouth uh feeling like you're tasting anything. It's all like it's like perfume bottle. — Yeah. Right. Now, one of the big times savers you would have if you're doing this is once you go through the process of deciding what you don't like and what you do like, say none of these are any good or good, you could then go through the process and maybe let it distill for 3 or 4 hours and collect all of that component. So, you could simplify the divisions or the cuts once you kind of know where you're going. This is number 10. — That was it. Weird. — Yeah, I'd say it's almost like the last one, but just milder. Maybe a little sweeter, but — Well, I was almost gonna say like almost a slight citric uh taste. — Yeah. Yeah. Not as strong as like lime or something like that, but more almost like a lemon or a grapefruit or something like that. Yeah. — It's not bad. All right, let's move on to 11. All right, there you go. It's fairly similar. — Yeah, I'm getting that citrus thing stronger in this though. — It's more than the last one, but it's very close. — I agree. I wouldn't say more, but I wouldn't say less. Okay. Yeah, it's a rough call. I'm not sure about. All right. 12

Thank you. — Oh, that's a got a new — That's very different. — Yeah. All of a sudden, oh, that's interesting. I don't even know how to place that. Rose bushes. — Yeah. F. Almost like you went into a florists. — Yeah. It's rosy — and a little bit more aringent. Like it's it tastes almost like there's it's not sour. — Yeah. — But like it it's like the tannin kind of pulls a little bit of — moisture from your mouth. — Yeah. That's that was an interesting transition from there. — Very different. — Yeah. All right. 13. Two more to go. — That was good, though. I like that one. — Yeah. Actually, this one's I think going to make it. Sorry. This one smells similar, but a little less rosy. Yeah. Oh, but I like that one more. — Yeah. — Yeah, that's actually that could have been one of the best. Yeah. — Yeah, I like Yeah. [clears throat] Yeah. I like this one a lot. — Okay. And I'd still prefer like Coca-Cola, but it's still it's good. — Yeah. Right. I like that. — Did you rinse it? — No. All right. Now, we don't have much of this, but it is what it is. Plus, it's probably going to be fairly similar to that. — Yeah. I like And what's interesting about that one, it sort of uh stays in your mouth. You — Yeah. — You can still taste it. — They say that like really higher quality wines will tend to have more persistence. That's some I was watching a couple of YouTube videos on wine tasting and everything and they say especially with the reds if you've got a really high-end wine that persistence like after you're done and you're talking or something like that you can still sort of taste it in your mouth. — Okay. — So very similar. Yeah, I would say these are pretty much the same. I think I like I like the one previously. — I like this one better. This one's a little bit more citrusy, but not bad. No, not bad. All right. Now, we're going to try the final cut that I actually didn't distill. It was just from the pot. Rather than scorching anything, I decided to stop here. So, let's get the big bottle over here. See if I can make it down to the bottom. Remember, this is going to turn your lips purple cuz this has got all the color of 5 lers of wine in it. Yeah, it is. It's very concentrated. I probably should use the other squirter for the next run. Okay. I like the smell. I do too. Oh, it's very strong. — Tart. Yeah. That's tart. — It's tart. It's got a nice flavor. — Oh, that's tart. — that's Yeah, — too neutral. — I I like it a lot. It tastes great, but it's like having concentrated grape juice with alcohol. — Yeah. It's like taking those old Kool-Aid things or those powdered mixes — and just taking them dry, you know? — Sure. Yeah. — Okay. All right. So, now we're going to do this again

— but this time we're going to be uh excluding things. We're going to get rid of what we don't like. And that's so strong. I think I'm going to do a double rinse here. Otherwise, I'm not going to taste anything. May even want to rinse my mouth again. Okay. All right. So, let's get rid of this one simply because it's got that very strong concentrate at the end and it's going to mess up our taste buds. So, let's start with number one again. And this time, be frank. You like it, you don't like it. Should we leave it out? in? All right. Basically, it's pure alcohol. Yeah. So, it's like if you wanted to make your wine non-alcoholic, you'd probably leave the first three components out and you pretty much have a non-alcoholic wine. — But I don't want to do that. I want to make remake the wine. So, I think I would include that one in there even though it's as strong as it is because otherwise we won't have any alcohol. — Yeah. Versus the Yeah. You want to mix in uh the um the taste, but also the alcohol, right? — So that basically there's no more alcohol on the table than there would have been in the full box. Did you rinse yours yet? — Uh no. — Yeah, that is a rough one, though. — Yeah, that's Yeah. — Oh, you could clean surfaces with that one. All right, so we're going to leave one in. And I think two in, but we'll just confirm. And so far, we're sober, I think. — Yeah, for the most part. — Okay. All right. This is should be similar. — Yeah, it's the same. — actually. Maybe slightly stronger — almost, but there's more flavor now. There. The other one was just like — maybe that's — rubbing alcohol, you know? All right. So, we're going to save this one, too. Yeah, that's the right answer. Woof. See, this would also be a lot of fun if you were going to do this is to do this, you know, with a group of people, like a whole bunch of people, and get different opinions because I'm sure you get into discussions, arguments, you know, stories and everything like that even before everybody has had a lot to drink. — Yeah, the arguments will come. But — yeah, right. — All right. So, so far we're keeping everything. Still had alcohol. — I like that. I was about [clears throat] to say I like that one. Out of the uh first three, I like this one the most. — Yeah. Of the first two, did you like the second one more than the first just because the first was sort of flavorless alcohol? — Very similar. — Okay. So, it would be up to you. I say — I think I'm tempted because they're similar enough even though I like this more. I'm tempted to keep all three simply because that's where most of the alcohol is coming from. So, I don't want to, you know, cut it down to half the potency. All right. Let's go. Number four. Just to make sure this time I'm going to remember — to brain state. Yep. — Yeah. — Right. It's more floral and — Yeah, I like the flavor a lot. — I like it. Yeah, I think I'm going to leave this one, too. All right, so far we haven't really excluded anything. All right, more rinsing, — but also you don't want to add too many where it's like — Well, in theory, if I added everything back, I've recreated the wine. — Right. Right. So, I'm I would only be concerned about fortifying it if

it turned out that um I took so much of this out, like say the lower alcohol, this will get stronger, — right? — So, we could theoretically what you might do is if we took a lot of this out, you could take something here you didn't want out to kind of balance it, but we'll see. All right. Five. Did I just do this one? — Um, I don't know. I wasn't really paying attention. I was looking at the camera to see if it was still record. — Well, how many more are we going to This was supposed to be a science show, but it's going to end up being a comedy show by the time we're done. All right. No, I don't think we did — because — Yeah, that's different. — It's definitely like lighter. It's got a nice flavor. I don't dislike it. — Well, actually, that would be a good experiment because it's filmed. So, if we did just drink that one and it turns out it was a different like Yeah. Right. This tastes completely different than the one we just tasted, which was it. — Yeah. Right. I get you. — But yeah, I don't Yeah, that one is Yeah. Not my favorite. — No. Well, do you think it's not your favorite enough that we should sort of put it on a Maybe not. — I would. Yeah. I mean, like, how many do you need? — Um, what? — Well, the idea is — it's Well, it's up to you, but I'm giving my opinion. I'm like the taste tester here. So, — I'm going to put this back a little bit. — Yeah. — And then we can always decide after the fact if we changed our minds. — Sure. just because of that flavor. All right, cuz there were a few in here I know I'm going to exclude. Just the first time I went through it, I was not turned on by that at all. — Yeah. N — I would No. — Yeah. — Like I'm giving my honest opinion. I don't No. — That one's That one is pretty easy to me. Okay. Didn't like it. And it could be like the second time we're going through this, we may have a slightly different opinion than we did the first time. So that's always possible that we could change our minds. But I think it should pretty much hold. This was rinsed. — Yep. Okay. All right. It's like less bad flavor, but also less alcoholic. — Yeah. which we're going to definitely have. So, you just got to be doing the flavor. I think the flavor isn't bad. — Yeah, it's — But there's almost nothing to it. — Neutral. Yeah. — Yeah. I think I'm going to leave this out because it does have something in it and I'm not sure, but I don't particularly like it. — Yeah, I me either. Like I wouldn't grab a bottle of that refrigerated out of the — refrigerator. So, all right. At some point when he's not looking, I'm just going to give him the water and see if he can. — Yeah, I think I'd be able to tell it that. — Oh, that's — At this point, I might not be able to tell. No, it's like it is very — This is the one where I think it's starting to become more like that time kind of thing. — Yeah. I'm not really turned on by it. — No, — let's be selective. — It's it very bland. — Bland and odd. — Yeah, — it does taste a little bit like I got to say bay leaves. It's just — I'm not getting that from it, but I understand like sort of the spice thing that you're think like oregano bay leaves — almost like you had walked into a room where they ate pizza 3 hours ago. Like an old spicy kind of like — not sure what it is. isn't good.

— But I wouldn't say very potently. — No. It's That's why it's so uncertain because it's like it's faint. That one's more floral to me. — Yeah. I would say I might like that one because it's kind of like it still has this sort of somewhat herbal taste, but there's now moving into something again a little bit more floral. — I think is this the one that I called the rose water like uh smeller taste? — I can't remember, but — it's very similar. It might be wrong, but — if it isn't it that flavor is beginning to develop and maybe we're more sensitive to it, but I think I like this Yeah, I don't mind that one. Yeah, that one's fine. — Okay, so we're going to leave this one here. Or no, wait, that's my signal. Leave it open. Some point I'm going to mess this up. — Well, there's so many. — Yeah. All right. Get myself a little more water here. All right. So now what is this? Number 10. Number Less of that oreganoy thing. — More of the rose. Yeah. This is a definite keep. — Do you agree with that? It sounds It's smells and tastes like some sort of rose — Yeah. It's hard. It's like — lavendery or something. — I would say roses. It almost tastes like you went into sort of like almost like a great big box store and they had sort of a department like in the back like a flower shop and you're walking past it. You're like I smell something but I don't really know what it is but it is that it's not soapy but it is like floral — but weak. — Yep. — Yeah. I like those. Okay. So, so far we've only excluded these right here. All right. This is 11, right? — Yeah. Even more so. — Oh, yeah. This is a definite keeper. Unless you strongly feel differently. I like that. — Yeah. Yeah, I like — the floral is even stronger here. — Yeah, — it keeps getting better. — Yeah. And I don't really think we need to taste this again because the point is we're going to add that because that's got a lot of the character and the color and everything. So, we really don't have much of a choice for that. Is this the one that surprised us? — To me, it's very similar to the last one. — It's a little sweeter. Almost getting a little bit of that citrus, but I like that. — Oh, yeah. You're right. Yeah, it's got that citrusy almost the tannin kind of thing that we were talking about. — Yeah. — Do you disagree? Would you leave it out? — I wouldn't disagree, but it's very similar to the last one. That's why I wouldn't agree or disagree. — And it's up to you like what you want to keep in. It's just I'm giving my opinion. — Sure. — Yeah. Whatever. Just because I made it doesn't mean that I know how to taste it. Yeah, I like that too. That's that citrus. It's the tannin is coming through stronger. That aringency. — Yeah. Okay. — I would definitely leave that. So, I think we're almost done with this part of it. Just going to make sure that the little drilets in here are okay. But I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly, and it's

harder and harder to remember, um I think this was very similar to the last one. And we just It's almost meaningless. There's not going to be much left, but we'll confirm that we were right. — Yeah, — it's very similar. Yeah. — Yeah. Okay. So, I think we have a conclusion here. Really, the only things that we're going to leave out, and this thing is like almost meaningless, but I'm going to include it anyway, are going to be these four components here right in the middle. So, that's kind of an interesting fact is that we're not getting them through here. We're really just getting it from here. So, if you could carefully hand me that pot. — We're going to do a very high-tech mixing here. All right. So, everything that we decided to keep is going in this big container. This does seem very moonshiny, doesn't it? Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait. I was being stupid. — Yeah. Don't keep those. — Don't keep those. All that work to separate them just to put them right back together again. put everything in there and it's like, wait, I think I might have forgotten something, — right? Or you get more volume when you're done. Man, that stuff is like ink. — Yeah, it is very It's thicker than you would think. — Yeah. — It's cool. All right, this looks all cleaned up. [clears throat] I've mixed everything together here. And I'm going to make up some samples for Alex and for me. And then I'll start pouring these in. — Yeah. Would you? It'll save some time. And in the comments, don't complain about my scooper. And also pouring. I'm not professional. But, you know, you will get complaints anyway, — especially if you do a really bad job. — All right. I'd be worried if I was a waiter. — Yeah. I'd rather be a chef. That's true. Okay, so just to reiterate, this is the original Franzia. These are the modified Franzia and these correspond to each one of their bottles. Low price to high price. So why don't we start out with just tasting the wine that we spend so much time to make. — See if we like it. Smells good. It's fruity. — Very tart. — Yeah. — And not in a bad way. — No. It's I wouldn't call it tart. I'd call it like that tannin. Sort of aringent. Kind of dries out your mouth. — It's good though. — Okay. All right. Now, we're going to share this glass. This is the original. — Okay. Yeah. Of that. Yeah. — That one smells definitely more tart. Okay, hold up. I need — Don't mix these up. I'm just going to put them between. — I'm not going not going. — We're fighting over it. — Yeah, it's better. — Yeah, there's no question. It's better. — Yeah. — Yeah, definitely better. — All right. Now, let's take this and put this back here so we don't get them mixed up.

Okay. Now, you want to try this first? — Sure. — This is the cheapest. Yeah. Cupcake. Okay. — It's hard to believe that cupcake would be the high-end. — It's similar, but just kind of bland. Let me see. Got it. Yeah, there's like no floral. — Yeah, it's just — it's wine. — It's not bad, but there's nothing to it. — Yeah. — It tastes almost like fruit juice with alcohol in it. — Yes. — Yeah, I agree. — Okay, then I'll now uh I'm going to do a little bit of this. Good point. All right, try that. Smells similar. I actually I like that one, but it's more of a sweet sort of like candy flavor. Let's see. — I wouldn't say it's better. — How do you compare it to the one that we made? — Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's sweet. — Yeah. Almost too sweet. — For a wine. — It almost tastes like they added sugar to it. It's that much sweeter. — Yeah. Now. — Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. No, that's better. All right. We're on a roll. Okay. Now, this one not sweet enough to me. It's got an odd aroma. I don't think it's cked, but — very dry. — Yeah. It makes your teeth itch, but it's got a lot of the same character that I taste in here. Try this. I know this is odd, but try this and your modified version by Right. — right after each other and see if you can almost tell that they're like the same flavor. Yours is slightly sweeter and more. a little tiny little less dry. — Okay. So, basically kind of a sweeter. — What about the floral characteristics? — No, I like yours more. So — more than that. — Yeah. — Okay. All right. I'll take that. — All right. Let's try the highend highest end wine. — So that's that one. — We're on a roll. — Yeah. If it's And um — I think $69 a bottle. — Okay. Yeah. I wasn't sure if you wanted Yeah. Okay. — $3 a bottle plus some equipment. — Well, yeah, the equipment is part of it, but Okay. I have to say I really like the smell. Smell it first before we even taste it. — All right. — That's nice. — Smells good. That — I'll taste it now that I had it. — Okay. It does smell good. It's like a That's good. Now, I don't know if we beat this. — Oh, no. You beat No, no, no, nope, no. You beat it. Definitely. The smell is amazing, but — the flavor, you're right. It's like there's more to the aroma than there is to the flavor. — Ooh. — But there's some like almost like oak. — That may be oak aged. I could look at the bottle and see because, you know, — sometimes they put — Well, it's called silver oak actually — and they and I think it's what is that n What was that 2000? Okay, I'm going to be impressed if it actually is oak aged because I didn't see the label. — Then that Okay, then. Okay, that's you could become a Somalier. Um I can't remember the date on that. Is that like 22 or 18 or something? — Um

— I think it's 2018. Yeah, 2018. — Okay, so that's 8-year-old wine. I I'm almost positive they would have stored that in a barrel for some fraction of time. — Yeah. Yeah, — it definitely has an oak flavor. — Yeah, it does. Which I like. — I like that. — But it's super dry, not very fruity. I like the um the smell a lot more than the flavor, though. — Right. [snorts] — If you were just to smell this versus the stuff we made, just smell it. — I like the smell of that. — I think this of the um what? Silver oak. — Silver oak. Yeah. More. I like the smell of this more. — Yeah. — But flavor-wise, — no, definitely not. It's too dry. Not fruity enough. — Yeah, it's dry and thin. Uh, all I would say is like this seems to have more complexity than the flavor. And part of that might be that we removed a lot of the sort of watery funky stuff in the middle. — Sure. — So, we left the rich flavor and the alcohol. — Sure. Let me uh give that back to me. So we don't mess them up. — I thought you were like, "Let me finish that. " — No, no. — All right. Um, now clearly we're biased because we spent a lot of time making this, so we're going to have a bias here. At least Alex is a little less biased. It's, you know, but nevertheless, just two people. But I'm positive that if you were to give this to a, you know, a room full of strangers, there's no question that this wine is definitely better than what we started out with. No question about that. Right. — Yeah. Okay. — I agree. — It's substantially better than this, which is just flat. It's like grape juice with water in it. There's almost no fermented flavors to it at all. It's a very flat red wine. It's definitely better than this. This was too sweet. Uh there was something about it. It's almost like they might have fortified it with a little extra alcohol or a little extra sugar or something. I don't like it. Uh it's not a bad flavor, but I think it's just cloyingly sweet. This was good. — Yeah, very good. — It's very good. It has a nice aroma to it. flavor. It's fairly well balanced. There's a little bit of a something odd in it, almost like a spice that I can't identify. But the point is, — I think if I was going to be really conservative, like really critical about this, I would say that on a comparison, I would put us at about the level of the best wine. Better smell from there, better taste from this. But that's $90 a bottle. And this stuff costs $3 a bottle. So effectively do one run with this and you could essentially pay for all of the equipment the first time you did that. And obviously uh you could scale that up. What I was doing was sort of a test, but you could increase the size of that whole setup that I just showed you threefold and it would cost you about another $100 and you could produce 15 lers of wine at a time, which is arguably as good as a $90 bottle of wine. So, this was a success. I'm actually really pleased with this and I think we're going to revisit this with maybe some different wines like maybe a Merllo or even a white shabi or something like that to like try something quite different and see if it still holds up. But the concept is pretty simple. You remove from the wine anything that you don't like and you specifically remove what you don't like. So, you make the wine something that you really do enjoy. So hopefully you learned a little bit about vacuum distillation, some of the equipment that's necessary, the process involved, and where we're moving in terms of distillation and fermentation and some of these other cooking experiences that have a significant amount of uh scientific uh aspect to them. So, I want to thank you very much for watching and like I've been telling people for the last few videos, we are only releasing our videos on Saturday mornings and we are following those releases that Saturday night or tonight with a live stream so we can get into it. We'll enjoy some wine. Uh we'll discuss with you any questions you have about this particular video or any other science, engineering, and technology subject that you want to talk about. So, please subscribe, put in your comments. I read them all and I try to answer as many questions as possible. Stay safe, have fun, and we'll see you soon. — Yeah, I'll see you soon, too. — Cheers. — [singing] — is fading me. Let them go.