I am writing to you from a cafe in the Napa Valley and overhearing a conversation about where food comes from. A woman is afraid to buy food in the supermarket because she has no idea where it comes from. Ironic in the Napa Valley.

Dr. Frankenstein would be proud. Do you know that many wineries use invasive technology to eliminate flaws instead of farming properly? You can only cheat nature for so long...one day you will have ugly kids with your plastic surgery Ken or Barbie and be sorely disappointed. If you want to skip to the scary part, scroll to the end paragraph quoting the owner of Winesecrets.

According to industry magazine Wines & Vines, one of these technology companies has been acquired by, in an ironic twist, a company called American Winesecrets. "Acquiring Vinovation's mobile service allowed Winesecrets to offer taint removal as well. Winesecrets has since developed a fleet of trucks, trailers and trained wine technicians to deliver the tartrate and taint removal services to wineries across the United States and Canada.
With the acquisition of Vinovation's reverse osmosis-based technologies and alcohol adjustment services, Winesecrets will offer more filtration services, including reduction of volatile acidity, alcohol adjustment, Brettanomyces taint removal via reverse osmosis, tartaric stabilization and pH reduction using STARS, cross-flow filtration and ultra-filtration.
During the last few years, Winesecrets has added the technology to remove smoky flavors from wines affected by forest fires. "They can make your wine smell like an ashtray," Dahlberg says. The company first offered the service in Ontario, where extensive fires affected vineyards in 2003.
Unlike the other filtration services, alcohol adjustment involves distillation, so it can only be done at a facility with a distilled spirits permit (DSP), including the plant in Sebastopol. Winesecrets has mobile equipment that can be taken to other facilities. It has sites in Sebastopol and Napa, Calif., Dundee, Ore., Penticton, British Columbia, and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
Though not often discussed by winemakers, the filtration technologies are widely used. "Almost everyone who is anyone in the wine business has used Vinovation's services," Dahlberg says. He says that between his existing business and the new services, 300 to 400 companies now use Winesecrets' capabilities."