In the Guardian, Calla Wahlquist reports on a recycling initiative that we almost certainly don’t need:
At the close of the Rootstock sustainable wine festival in Sydney last year, Tasmanian distiller Peter Bignell looked around the tasting room at the carefully-spaced spittoons and thought: what a waste.
Together the spit buckets contained about 500 litres of discarded wine, which had been swilled then dumped during the two-day event.
Some wine had been dutifully spat out by responsible tasters keen to get to the end of their extensive list with tasting notes intact, but the majority was the largely untouched leavings of an overly generous pour.
It’s nothing new in the idea of using spit to make food
Peter Bignell
For Bignell, whose Belgrove distillery in Kempton, Tasmania, is the only one in Australia that runs entirely on biodiesel, all this wasted wine was hardly in keeping with a sustainable event.The obvious solution was to drink it again.
After 12 months at Poor Tom’s gin distillery in Marrickville, the spit bucket wine has been transformed into an 80-proof clear spirit that tastes something like an unaged brandy.
It is, reportedly, quite nice.
H/T to Tim Worstall, who rightly comments “Distillation will obviously have thoroughly cleaned it. But still. It’s not as if the world is short of crap wine to turn into cooking brandy now, is it?”
