A Professor of Industrial and Food Microbiology, Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Kwara State University, KWASU, Prof. Sunday Awe has clarified that every wine is produced with some quantity of alcohol.
Prof. Awe who was the 11th KWASU professor to hold his inaugural lecture, emphasised that non-alcoholic wine never exists.
The erudite academic made this mind-blowing clarification during his inaugural lecture, held on Wednesday, May 10 at the KWASU Convocation Arena (CVA), Malete.
Awe furthered there is only de-alcoholized wine, which according to him, is produced through a process on which the alcohol is extracted by spinning cone, vacuum distillation often referred to as “reverse osmosis.”
Awe noted that, “Generally, de-alcholized wines contains less than 1 per cent alcohol and the very fine de-alcoholized wines can have as low as 0.05 per cent but rarely 0.0 per cent”.
He added, “What people parade as non-alcoholic wines in our shopping malls are actually fruit juice or sparkling drinks in wines bottles with addition of flavours, preservatives and indication of expiry dates, whereas real wine does not contain preservatives and expiry date since the alcoholic content serves as its preservative and the longer it stays the better the taste”.
Awe, whose lecture was titled “FROM THE FIELD TO THE BOTTLES: WORKS OF INVISIBLE CREATURES” noted that the alcoholic content in the wine be filtered and made to serve other purposes aside consumption.
Prof. Awe also recommended that fruit should be used in preparing wines in place of imported ones, maintaining it would help boost Nigeria local economy which would indirectly bring about foreign exchange and also reduce the country’s heavy import bills.
Some of his recommendations include the use of sorghum grains as natural substance for the production of anthocyamin under a five day solid state fermentation using Pantoea dispersa strain LMG 2603 as a means of increasing the yield of anthocyanin and will help in solving the problem of anthocyanin deficiency.
He, however, advised Nigerians to properly wash fruits and vegetables using salt water to avert microbial and parasitic infections before consumption.
The Microbiology teacher also advised the use of solar disinfection and storage of water in containers for a period of time as that it help in purifying drinking water and eliminate water borne diseases.
