Vintage flavour: A woman smells red wine at a wine-tasting seminar in Tokyo

The sommelier arrives with a ?525 bottle of wine and presents it with a flourish. It is a 1982 Ch?teau La Fleur-P?trus Pomerol Bordeaux, and expectations are high. He tastes a sample of the decanted wine ? and grimaces. Instead of a clean, fresh, fruity taste, it is dank, musty and flat. The wine has gone off ? “corked” in the argot of the industry.

Previously the only solution was to pour it down the sink ? but not any more. A French biochemist has invented a device that chemically “cleans up” corked wine, restoring its original bouquet.

It is estimated that as many as one in 10 bottles is contaminated with TCA ? or 2,4,6-trichloroanisole ? a chemical compound sometimes created when cork is washed. The contamination costs the consumer and the industry an estimated ?340 million a year. Prof. Gerard Michel, a biochemist from Burgundy, one of the world’s top wine-making regions, claims that his invention can return foul-smelling, noxious red, white or sparkling wine to their former glory in less than an hour.

The device, called Dream Taste, will go on sale in Britain at a cost of ?40, plus ?3 for each of the chemical treatments required for each bottle. It works by using an ionised material known as copolymer to absorb the cork-tainted molecules in the wine.

The corked wine has to be decanted into a conical plastic decanter and then the copolymer ? shaped like a bunch of grapes ? is immersed in the wine until the bitter taste disappears. Once all the contaminated molecules have been withdrawn the copolymer is thrown away and the wine is ready to drink. Michel, who created the kit with Laurent Villaumea, his colleague at the Vect ‘Ouer laboratory in Meursault, said that the invention was the result of more than 20 years of experience travelling the vineyards of the world studying cork taint.

It can, however, be a slow process. “A low-level taint will disappear in a few minutes but a high-level taint will take an hour or more,” said Michel. “To get this result we conducted thousands of tests and we used specialists trained to detect cork taint to tiny levels, as low as two nanograms of TCA per litre.” The average taster can normally detect corked wine at around three to four nanograms.

To see if Dream Taste lived up to the marketing hype, The Telegraph arranged for wine connoisseurs to put it to the test at the Greenhouse, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair, London, which has the country’s largest and most diverse wine list. The test was carried out by the Greenhouse’s head sommelier James Payne, on two of the six corked bottles of wine the restaurant had opened in the past week.

Though impressed by the device, James said that it would be useless for restaurants: “We just don’t have the time to be messing around with jugs and plastic grapes. However, I can see this being great for home.”

Embag, the company marketing Dream Taste, said it had received more than 10,000 advance orders in France, mainly from the wine trade, and the invention has won over some of Europe’s harshest wine critics. Laure Gasparatto, from Le Figaro newspaper, said: “The experience is surprising. Little by little, the taster perceives an extraordinary evolution in the wine. Its normal characteristics reappear.”

Others are more sceptical. Marianne McKay, who runs a wine production degree at the University of Brighton, offered “reserved praise”.

She said: “The chemical principle is sound. Polymers have been used in separation technologies for decades. But the polymer would have to be extremely selective to remove only a single type of molecule from the wine and not some of the ‘good’ aroma contributors, too. Also, leaving wines for an hour before drinking can sometimes ? especially for whites ? mean you risk losing the freshness.”

The Daily Telegraph