The Wine Clip

[thewineclip]

Currently, the Dinner topic has 4,459 replies. Keep trying, though.

Like I said, you can write. But you cannot read! I said WINE - I care less about Dinner.

[gsquared]

But G, we have this claim in our midst and those of us who -- like you -- make eGullet what is have, I think, an obligation to be truth-seekers in this regard. Of course you don't have to agree with me.

I fully agree, FG. My point was prompted by a desire to allow leeway for the effect of the mind on a subjective experience and in no way diminishes my appetite for the truth.

In any even, given Mark's results, it all seems moot - the bloody thing seems to work!

[thewineclip]

All anybody needs to know about your disingenuous approach to salesmanship and truth can be found in your Oct 12 2003, 12:20 PM statement that "I don't have all the answers and quite frankly I won't be looking for them either." Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it among intelligent, educated, literate people.

What I meant with that statement is this:

We are using taste tests as our way to bring light to the product. I will let people decide for themselves if they like the taste of wine when treated with the wine clip. Just like Pepsi did when it battled coke (and won).

We are not going to hire a third party to do lab testing.

If it makes the eG users feel any better, we will delete any and all content on our website that states the word "scientific". Although we tested it in a lab with people who have PHd's it was not in the way certain eG members (not you) suggest we should have.

Edited October 13, 2003 by thewineclip (log)

[thewineclip]

Can't wait for www.fat-guy.com to go live!

Will you be selling ad space?

[thewineclip]

But G, we have this claim in our midst and those of us who -- like you -- make eGullet what is have, I think, an obligation to be truth-seekers in this regard. Of course you don't have to agree with me.

I fully agree, FG. My point was prompted by a desire to allow leeway for the effect of the mind on a subjective experience and in no way diminishes my appetite for the truth.

In any even, given Mark's results, it all seems moot - the bloody thing seems to work!

Yes sir, it does.

[LindaJ]

This has been such an interesting flame war... umm... discussion that I felt the need to register after trolling for a number of months. Hi!

This isn't The Wine Spectator, but there's value in an opinion that does NOT have a big ad for The Wine Clip next to it. That's why I come to this site. Many potential customers for this device will come to this site for years when they do a search for the product. Would be helpful if the CEO didn't behave like an ass And I only mean that in a helpful, constructive way.

Wish I had been at the tastings. But I won't buy the gagdet. I'd rather invest the money in product.

[Carema]

And yes, you are so right and I am soooo happy you said it... it's just a drink not medicine.

If so then why do you claim you will cure us of all our bitterness? Our tongues are jaded our arms are burnt.....

[gsquared]

I even sent a clip to South Africa (not exactly a cheap event).

It is worth recording that I offered to reimburse Dennis his postage to South Africa. Noted just because he keeps on mentioning the cost.

[SethG]

Mark, I think Shaw's being a bit too picky about your tests, but you really ought to stage another, more scientific gathering..... and invite me!

I can be a non-expert spoiler for your group. Comic relief. Sort of a Ringo to your John and Pauls.

And maybe I can snag a clip on my way out. But with my luck, it'll be the placebo clip.

[Carema]

But you cannot read!  I said WINE - I care less about Dinner.

Here the two are inexorabley linked.

[tommy]

No, we didn't document anything. Instead, we had fun meeting and drinking wine with 2k+ people, some of which we sold some clips to.

that must have been some party.

i'm amazed that no one has mentioned these tastings on the internet at all. at least according to all of the search engines i've tried.

[SethG]

And Mr. Clip, if I may presume to throw a little advice your way:

I'm no businessman, but one thing I've learned in my business (lawyerin') is that you STOP ARGUING the instant your victory is in hand. If you keep at it, you just might argue your victory away.

This thread began with a true expert in the wine field saying your clip works, it ain't a placebo, and that he and his expert friends were not just impressed, but rather were amazed!

That was your cue to thank everyone for their honesty and integrity and say what a good time it's all been. You drink from the keg of victory, Mr. Clip! Ignore the sniping. Caveats, schmaveats. You WON.

Do not seek pity. Winners don't need pity.

Do not resort to ad hominem attacks. You don't need them; you're so much bigger than that.

Move on. Get on with forming a cabinet. Announce your next steps, now that eGullet has been conquered. Dismiss all dissenters with a magnanimous call for healing.

Just my two cents.

(And now, do I get a wine clip?)

[Craig Camp]

This interesting topic has dissolved into a name calling mess instead of the excellent discussion it was. Please refrain from any more personal attacks and snide comments and return to discussing the time and effort (OK it was not a miserable job) people put into testing the Wine Clip. Off topic insults will end up in never never land.

I am working on two assumptions:

1. Mr. Wine Clip is just a businessman who saw a product he thought would sell. He believes in it and is selling it in that way. He would not have put his product out in such a public way if he did not believe it works. Obviously his intention was to get some good exposure for his product - nothing wrong with that. I will say I find Mr. Wineclip's combative approach not in line with Zig Ziglar's concepts of good selling.

2. eGullet is heavily populated by well-educated and experienced amateurs and professionals that are bound to consider such products with a high degree of skepticism. I myself am very skeptical (I am in the experienced not the educated group - went to a state college in the early 70's you know). Although we may to be skeptical of this product there is no reason to treat Mr. Clip as some kind of crook as he gave us samples so that we can make our own decisions. This is hardly the act of someone who does not believe his product works - either by physical or psychological means.

Just for my future reference: Is calling someone a "scientist" an insult or a compliment?

I believe that as Mark's methods are different from the tests that Alex is conducting that the two in combination will be quite informative. Thanks to Mark and Doc for their interesting comments and I look forward to more from Alex.

Let the results speak for themselves. Mr. Wine Clip made the choice to start all of this and now must live with the results - good or bad.

[Schneier]

Just for my future reference: Is calling someone a "scientist" an insult or a compliment?

Depends on context. And audience.

Bruce

[thewineclip]

This has been such an interesting flame war... umm... discussion that I felt the need to register after trolling for a number of months. Hi! <waves>

This isn't The Wine Spectator, but there's value in an opinion that does NOT have a big ad for The Wine Clip next to it.  That's why I come to this site. Many potential customers for this device will come to this site for years when they do a search for the product. Would be helpful if the CEO didn't behave like an ass :) And I only mean that in a helpful, constructive way.

Wish I had been at the tastings. But I won't buy the gagdet. I'd rather invest the money in product.

I agree Linda, eG will attract potential buyers of TWC. It was suggested that I'm looking for free advertising. That is untrue.

As for me acting like an ass, I guess that's better than a crackpot.

[thewineclip]

I even sent a clip to South Africa (not exactly a cheap event).

It is worth recording that I offered to reimburse Dennis his postage to South Africa. Noted just because he keeps on mentioning the cost.

Yes, you did offer to pay us for the shipping. I told you it was on my dime.

[thewineclip]

But you cannot read!  I said WINE - I care less about Dinner.

Here the two are inexorabley linked.

inexorabley

I just learned a new word. Seriously.

[vengroff]

If we can go back to Mark's original summary for a moment, he said, "it makes wine taste as if it has been breathing for 30 minutes. It does not make wine taste as if it has been aged for many years as purported." As others have pointed out, this sounds like the clip might be hastening oxidation. Now we have a hypothesis that can be tested.

We know, from numerous experiments over the years, that oxidation occurs when wine is exposed to air. There are many other hypotheses we could come up with for what happens. For example, maybe it's alpha radiation that can't get through the bottle that changes the taste of wine in the first 30 minutes it is open. We can test that hypothesis in a lab, and find that it is incorrect. We can test the oxidation hypothesis and find that it is correct.

There are various ways we can do this. We can look at a masss spectrograph and find that there are more oxides in wine that has been exposed to oxygen for a while than in wine that has not. We can then correlate the presence of these oxides to changes in taste. We can also open a bottle in a chamber full of nitrogen and find that no oxidation takes place. In a similar manner, we could take a couple of cases of wine and some clips into a well equiped lab and test the hypothesis that wine that has been clipped becomes oxidized much more rapidly than wine that has not.

Unfortunately, Mr. Clip later stated

We are not going to hire a third party to do lab testing.

It's unfortunate because an expert has weighed in on what he thinks the effect is, and the hypothesis can be tested with a few well-designed experiments that don't require anyone to taste and report anything. The cost of the test would probably be less than Mr. Clip's monthly PR budget of $20K. Someone in the Chemistry department of a local university might even be willing to do it for a lot less than that. Stranger things have happened, like those guys at Purdue that light barbeques with liquid oxygen.

[thewineclip]

And Mr. Clip, if I may presume to throw a little advice your way:

I'm no businessman, but one thing I've learned in my business (lawyerin') is that you STOP ARGUING the instant your victory is in hand.  If you keep at it, you just might argue your victory away.

This thread began with a true expert in the wine field saying your clip works, it ain't a placebo, and that he and his expert friends were not just impressed, but rather were amazed!

That was your cue to thank everyone for their honesty and integrity and say what a good time it's all been.  You drink from the keg of victory, Mr. Clip!  Ignore the sniping.  Caveats, schmaveats.  You WON. 

Do not seek pity.  Winners don't need pity.

Do not resort to ad hominem attacks.  You don't need them; you're so much bigger than that.

Move on.  Get on with forming a cabinet.  Announce your next steps, now that eGullet has been conquered.  Dismiss all dissenters with a magnanimous call for healing.

Just my two cents.

(And now, do I get a wine clip?)

SethG:

Although I understand your message, I'm not sure if I agree with it. Since 9/5 I've absorbed a ton of crap. I took it and in having some fun I made some wise cracks back.

I was not here on a sales mission. If I were, my posts would be far different (more CEOish, I guess). I engaged in this thread because I knew that the wine clip's effect could not be denied. I was NOT looking to win a war.

But for as long as I bit my lip there are just some things I can't ignore. One, is being threatened by Member #1 that he and his legal team are going to hunt me down. Two, is that I've been accused of tricking people. Three, that not one person has said anything about the other well-known experts and their positive comments about The Wine Cellar Express.

The one that gets me the most is the legal threats. What kind of way is that to treat a person and company that offered its product to be tested. Furthermore, I'm sure Member #1 had some input with writing the eG user agreement. And from how I read it, Member #1, aka Fat Guy, crossed the line.

Contrary to your comments, I didn't win anything. I did not create magnetic fields. I did not create tannins. And I'm not the first guy to discover that magnets WILL alter the taste of wine. The Wine Clip proved itself in taste tests conducted by a respected member of eG. Yet still, no one posted anything regarding a "good for you Mr. Wine Clip".

SethG, I'd love to send you a clip for free but I cannot. I sent out 5 for FREE and stopped at that. Since then, I've been asked by many if I'd send them one. It would not be fair to the others if I sent it to you and not them. (Even if you write some of the smarter posts).

Edited October 13, 2003 by thewineclip (log)

[budrichard]

I read the first few posts and initial testing methodology and 'results'. I can't believe that this forum is wasting it's time and energy on this product. As I previously posted, by the very nature of the qualitative methods of testing available and the imprecise nature of our perceptions, a truly scientific and objective testing methodology is impossible to do. With the abscence of any qualitative testing available, science must prevail, and science says the 'Wine Clip' is junk.

BTW, if you debunk science and scientists, remember, it is they who keep your lights on(well most of the time for you in the EAST), make all your egadgets work and keep the planes in the air.

Having read a few more posts, I firmly agree with Mr Camp on decorum, and I find that 'The Wine Clip' has held up remarkably under all the negative posts, unfortuneatly, his product has no scientifc basis and cannot be tested.

One last thought on testing methodology. When endeavering to determine the effect of a variable, one wants to eliminate the effects of all other variables and hold those variables constant. By it's very nature, once you open a bottle of wine, even if you open two, one clipped and one unclipped, you cannot hold the other variables that are causing the wine to change constant. Add that to the subjective perceptions of the tasters and you must conclude that any scientific testing is impossible. -Dick

Edited October 13, 2003 by budrichard (log)

[vengroff]

Although we tested it in a lab with people who have PHd's it was not in the way certain eG members (not you) suggest we should have.

I, for one, would be very interested in reading the results of this laboratory study, regardless of the methodology. Is there any chance you could post the results on your web site and identify the primary investigator(s)?

[redwinegulper]

Mark, I think you did a great job trying to do some unbiased testing. Perhaps your testing did not follow the guidelines of a research project at MIT; but it did provide sufficient, unbiased insight into the product.

I think the Wine Clip would alter the taste of many wines, and it seems many times for the better.

I however will not be using the Wine Clip. Parhaps I am old fashion, but my desire is to taste the product that the wine maker made, for better or for worse.

[thewineclip]

This interesting topic has dissolved into a name calling mess instead of the excellent discussion it was. Please refrain from any more personal attacks and snide comments and return to discussing the time and effort (OK it was not a miserable job) people put into testing the Wine Clip. Off topic insults will end up in never never land.

I am working on two assumptions:

1. Mr. Wine Clip is just a businessman who saw a product he thought would sell. He believes in it and is selling it in that way. He would not have put his product out in such a public way if he did not believe it works. Obviously his intention was to get some good exposure for his product - nothing wrong with that. I will say I find Mr. Wineclip's combative approach not  in line with Zig Ziglar's concepts of good selling.

2. eGullet is heavily populated by well-educated and experienced amateurs and professionals that are bound to consider such products with a high degree of skepticism. I myself am very skeptical (I am in the experienced not the educated group - went to a state college in the early 70's you know). Although we may to be skeptical of this product there is no reason to treat Mr. Clip as some kind of crook as he gave us samples so that we can make our own decisions. This is hardly the act of someone who does not believe his product works - either by  physical or psychological means.

Just for my future reference: Is calling someone a "scientist" an insult or a compliment?

I believe that as Mark's methods are different from the tests that Alex is conducting that the two in combination will be quite informative. Thanks to Mark and Doc for their interesting comments and I look forward to more from Alex.

Let the results speak for themselves. Mr. Wine Clip made the choice to start all of this and now must live with the results - good or bad.

Craig:

That state college did wonders. After reading your posts I feel defended but at the same time I feel silly. I apologize for my posts that may have been offensive. They were more or less the reaction of a cornered tiger. It won't happen again. To Linda's point I will act more CEOish even when dealing with the silly comments of others.

I did not start the thread and I think that's important to note. In fact, I wasn't a member until I'd been notified by a friend that The Wine Clip was getting ripped on eG.

I also agree with your assessment of the eG user group. There are some people who write excellent (seriously)! There are others who really seem to have a passion for wine and that's admirable. However, when it comes to whether The Wine Clip makes for a more enjoyable wine, I don't think their opinions should be deemed more significant than the janitor who drinks Gallo.

Thanks for you intervention at a time when this thread was getting away.

[thewineclip]

If we can go back to Mark's original summary for a moment, he said, "it makes wine taste as if it has been breathing for 30 minutes. It does not make wine taste as if it has been aged for many years as purported."  As others have pointed out, this sounds like the clip might be hastening oxidation.  Now we have a hypothesis that can be tested.

We know, from numerous experiments over the years, that oxidation occurs when wine is exposed to air.  There are many other hypotheses we could come up with for what happens.  For example, maybe it's alpha radiation that can't get through the bottle that changes the taste of wine in the first 30 minutes it is open.  We can test that hypothesis in a lab, and find that it is incorrect.  We can test the oxidation hypothesis and find that it is correct. 

There are various ways we can do this.  We can look at a masss spectrograph and find that there are more oxides in wine that has been exposed to oxygen for a while than in wine that has not.  We can then correlate the presence of these oxides to changes in taste.  We can also open a bottle in a chamber full of nitrogen and find that no oxidation takes place.  In a similar manner, we could take a couple of cases of wine and some clips into a well equiped lab and test the hypothesis that wine that has been clipped becomes oxidized much more rapidly than wine that has not.

Unfortunately, Mr. Clip later stated

We are not going to hire a third party to do lab testing.

It's unfortunate because an expert has weighed in on what he thinks the effect is, and the hypothesis can be tested with a few well-designed experiments that don't require anyone to taste and report anything. The cost of the test would probably be less than Mr. Clip's monthly PR budget of $20K. Someone in the Chemistry department of a local university might even be willing to do it for a lot less than that. Stranger things have happened, like those guys at Purdue that light barbeques with liquid oxygen.

I believe that tests have been conducted by a University. I'm trying to find the report I read over a year ago. It was on the web. If I remember correctly, a scientific conclusion could not be determined.

I'll continue to search for that report.

[sammy]

Maybe I'm wrong but this seems to be the first time (at least that I'm aware of) that someone's claim on eGullet has been so scrutinized. People have been encouraged to purchase All Clad cookware, Riedel and Speiglau wine glasses Lobel's meats, etc. I can't remember anyone asking Evan Lobel to conduct a double blind scientific experiment to prove that their meat is worth the $35 per pound being charged. People here on the site took them up on their $50 off special, ordered the meat and enjoyed it, some more than others. No one was accused of not correctly cooking it or tasting it. If they liked it great, if not, well they'll just buy meat from someone else next time. No one ever suggested that Evan Lobel was selling snake-oil.

I for one thinks Mr. Clip has been a great member of e-gullet. We're always looking for things to purchase things that will add to our enjoyment of food and wine, whether it be utensils, books, cheese, etc. Why the hesitation here? Buy it, try it. If you don't think it makes the wine more enjoyable to drink, give it to someone you don't like as a gift.