Wine Cleaner

Reported December 2005

CORVALLIS, Ore. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- You've heard wine can improve your health, but it may also help clean your kitchen counters. From grapes to wine to natural disinfectant, microbiologists have found a new use for wine.

Mark Daeschel, Ph.D., a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., teaches people what it takes to make great Vino. He also knows there's more to wine than meets the eye. "It's just not the alcohol alone. It's not the acids alone. It's the two when you put them together," Daeschel says.

He estimates for every 100 gallons of drinkable wine, there's one gallon that's undrinkable. "It needs to be recycled, reused, or otherwise it gets just dumped into our waste drain." So Daeschel set out to make a natural cleaner with it. He found only white wine works -- red stains!

The wine acts as a disinfectant and kills salmonella, a common food-borne bacterium, within a few seconds. Daeschel says when you are watching the scene through a microscope it is total carnage.

Wine is good for cleaning kitchen countertops and fruit. You can get the same effect with almost any white wine ... But most people aren't willing to spend $10 or $20 to clean their kitchen sink. "It would be much easier to buy a product made from waste wine because, number one, it would be a lot cheaper because you don't have to pay the alcohol taxes," Daeschel says.

Daeschel is awaiting a patent on his wine cleaner. Until then you'll have two uses for that next bottle of chardonnay.

If the wine cleaner makes it to grocery store shelves, it will likely have salt added to it -- just like cooking wine -- so people won't want to drink it.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

American Society for Microbiology
1752 N Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036-2904
(202) 737-3600
http://www.asm.org

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