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aligned with the earth’s magnetic field after drinking more than two bottles. The general theory on wine maturation – and it warms the cockles of my heart to know there are people out there studying this – is that it’s all about the polymerisation of tannins, which could conceivably be accelerated if they were all concentrated in local pockets: although surely not in forty-five minutes.
    But this exciting new technology seems to be so potent – or perhaps unpatentable – that it is being flogged by at least half a dozen different companies. Cellarnot, marketing the almost identical ‘Perfect Sommelier’, even has personal testimonies from ‘Susan’ who works for the Pentagon, ‘Maggie, Editor, Vogue ’, and a science professor, who did not want to be named but who, after giving a few glasses to some friends, exclaimed, ‘The experiment definitely showed that the TPS is everything that it claims to be.’ He’s no philosopher of science. But perhaps all of these magnetic products will turn out to be interchangeable. Maybe I can even save myself some cash, and wear my MagneForce magnetic insoles (‘increases circulation; reduces foot, leg and back fatigue’) to improve the wine after I’ve drunk it.

    And most strangely of all, none of these companies seems to be boasting about having done the one simple study necessary to test their wine magnets. As always, if any of them want advice on how to do the stats on a simple double-blind randomised trial (which could, after all, be done pretty robustly in one evening with fifty people) – and if they can’t find a seventeen-year-old science student to hold their hand – I am at their disposal.

What Is Science? First, Magnetise Your Wine …
    Guardian , 3 December 2005
    People often ask me (pulls pensively on pipe), ‘What is science?’ And I reply thusly: Science is exactly what we do in this column. We take a claim, and we pull it apart to extract a clear scientific hypothesis, like ‘Homeopathy makes people better faster than placebo,’ or ‘The Chemsol lab correctly identifies MRSA’; then we examine the experimental evidence for that hypothesis; and lastly, if there is no evidence, we devise new experiments. Science.
    Back in December 2003, as part of our Bad Science Christmas Gift series, we discovered The Perfect Sommelier, an expensive wine-conditioning device available in all good department stores. In fact there are lots of devices like this for sale, including the ubiquitous Wine Magnet: ‘Let your wine “age” several years in only 45 minutes! Place the bottle in the Wine Magnet! The Wine Magnet then creates a strong magnetic field that goes to the heart of your wine and naturally softens the bitter taste of tannins in “young” wines.’
    At the time, I mentioned how easy it would be to devise an experiment to test whether people could tell the difference between magnetised and untreated wine. I also noted how strange it was that none of these devices’ manufacturers seemed to have bothered, since it could be done in an evening with fifty people.
    Now Dr James Rubin et al. of the Mobile Phones Research Unit at King’s College London, have published that very study, in the esteemed Journal of Wine Research . They note the dearth of experimental research (quoting, chuffingly, the Bad Science column), and go on: ‘One retailer states, “We challenge you to try it yourself – you won’t believe the difference it can make.”’
    Unwise words.
    ‘A review of Medline, PsychInfo, Cinahl, Embase, Amed and the Web of Science using the search term “wine and magnet” suggested that, as yet, no scientists have taken up this challenge.’
    Now, this study was an extremely professional operation. Before starting, they did a power calculation: this is to decide how big your sample size needs to be, to be reasonably sure you don’t miss a true positive finding by not having enough subjects to detect a small difference. Since the