It's such a romantic notion, that wines and spirits improve with barrel-aging. Verdant vineyards and happy harvesters bring to mind the pleasures of sniffing, swirling and quaffing wine. We've been led to believe that the best wines require a long time -- often several years -- in barrels (and then in bottles) to reach maturity and "drinkability." 
 
 As for grape spirits, generically known as brandies, it's a multi-billion dollar market worldwide. You distill the wine (and the pressed skins) to get the raw brandy, which is almost undrinkable in its early life. Before it's even palatable, to shave off the raw edges, it needs to mature. Typically, this is done in oak barrels, where, over time, the spirits pick up color and concentration. 
 
 Now a research team in Spain says a lot of that romance isn't necessary. Brandies can age just as well when they're zapped with ultrasound waves. The Spanish experiments, which seem promising, were first reported in the science magazine Discover. 
 
 A number of techniques have long been in the cellar master's toolkit. A stainless steel fermenting tank can be lined with oak staves; oak chips and oak extracts are often used to enhance the "buttery" flavor of young white wines; so-called "micro-oxygenation" introduces imperceptibly tiny bubbles in young red wines to accelerate their maturation. For spirits, which emerge from the still perfectly clear, it's not unheard of to use artificial coloring agents to bypass the years-long process of evaporation through the pores of oak barrels. 
 
 And there are home remedies, too: magnets that supposedly realign the molecules, and a variety of whirlers and twirlers that purport to add (or remove) oxygen. They share only only thing: ineffectiveness. 
 
 The best brandy is from the Cognac region in southwestern France. By law, it must be aged for a minimum of two years, and many are aged for ten years or more. But it's an expensive process, hence the drive to find less costly methods. 
 
 Ultrasound exams, a common medical procedure these days (to see unborn infants in the womb, for example), use high-frequency pressure waves. In commercial uses, ultrasound waves can actually cause tissues to rupture and release compounds stored within cells. 

 For many liquors, aging is the key to their distinct flavors. Brandy is no exception, with top-shelf labels spending years in casks. But chemists think they have discovered a shortcut—ultrasound. 
 
 Spanish researchers shot a river of brandy through a bed of American oak chips and blasted the mix with ultrasound for three days. They also altered a slate of variables, including temperature, amount of oak chips, alcoholic strength of the liquor, aeration, and more. The team then ran the results past a panel of experts, asking them to rate the quality of the different liquors. 
 
 Ultrasound appears to dramatically accelerate the aging process. 
 
 While not quite up to the standards of a truly-aged brandy, the ultrasonic spirits were still well received. Here’s Charles Q. Choi, reporting for Discover: 
 
 “Obtaining, in three days, a spirit with characteristics near to two-years-aged brandies was something really unexpected for us,” says study co-author Valme García, a professor at the University of Cádiz in Spain. Eight trained judges, including some of the researchers, deemed the resulting spirits nearly as good as traditional brandies. “They tasted surprisingly well, with good fruity and sweet flavors and a high aromatic intensity,” García said. 
 
 The best brandy produced in this experiment was stiff—130 proof, or 65% alcohol—and run past a large number of oak chips at room temperature with a bit of aeration. 
 
 The accelerated aging is brought about thanks to ultrasound-induced cavitation in the oak chips, where small bubbles formed by the sound waves “explosively collapse,” blasting the wood’s tissues and releasing compounds that add distinctive flavors to the liquor. Booze experts call these “congeners.” 
 
 While the liquor produced by the accelerated aging process can’t legally be called brandy in Europe since regulations require that the spirit be aged in oak casks, Gargía pointed out that the technique could be used to help distillers accelerate their development process. Want to know how a new cooper’s casks will affect the flavor? Add ultrasound. What about a different species of wood? Again, ultrasound could help. 
 
 Beyond that, more adventurous distillers may gin up entirely new alcoholic beverages with unusual flavors. For García, wine is next on the list.
– We don't want to say this is a better use of ultrasound than giving expecting parents a first look at their unborn babies, but ... Discover reports scientists in Spain have figured out they can use ultrasound to create brandy that tastes like it's been aged for years in just three days. Brandy is made by distilling wine then aging it in wood casks for two years to more than a decade, according to Forbes. The process can be expensive, but before the brandy is aged it's "almost undrinkable." Chemical reactions between the alcohol and the wood casks are what give brandies their flavor, smell, and color. That process takes years. Correction: It used to take years. Building off previous research that found ultrasound could be used to get chemicals out of plant tissue, researchers ran distilled wine through American oak chips while hitting it with ultrasound. The ultrasound waves created tiny bubbles that caused the oak chips to release chemical compounds, adding the brandy flavor, Nova Next reports. The results, published in Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, were "really unexpected," one researcher tells Discover. Eight trained judges ruled the ultrasound brandy "tasted surprisingly well" and was comparable to aged brandies. And while, at least in Europe, brandy has to be barrel-aged to legally be called brandy, this process could be used to quickly test different woods or to create an entirely new kind of liquor. (Meanwhile, synthetic alcohol promises the buzz without the hangover.)