Sensitive crystalization of Wine

It's a new year, and intelligent people will continue to find differences of opinion between themselves as they have throughout history.
In fact, even though we find ourselves another year away from our superstition ridden past, it's not uncommon to find otherwise reasonable people who might still hold onto "quaint, old fashioned" ideas - like astrology actually being accurate, etc.
But to find that the number of people who are turning their backs upon science, and reverting to "populist psuedoscience" as evidenced by the "sensitive crystallization" movement within the wine industry, is...well, an "ill omen".

For those not familiar with the practice, wine is mixed with a solution of copper chloride, dried at 95°C (~205°F), and the resulting crystal pattern is interpreted.

Amazingly, the pattern is supposed to reveal the inner strength and harmony of the wine. Yet more amazing is that reasonable people seem to be suspending their critical thinking processes, and start believing that it actually IS doing what proponents claim.

Along those lines, Domaine Laflaive has results posted for a rather interesting experiment - sensitive crystalization of a vintage 2000 Burgundy...

From the picture above on the right, we see a wine which is obviously damaged after being scanned with a supermarket scanner (from the article posted on the Domaine Leflaive website). The "tell-tale" marks in the crystal which are so important are the ones which breakup the even visual flow. But do they really portend such ill omens as the article concludes? If you allow your wine to be scanned by an optical scanner at the local market, is it really going to be "dumb" for 10 days following it???

Personally, I can't speak to the types of optical scanners they were using, but I find it highly unlikely that a quick scan - which takes what, 1/3 of a second? - would have such a profound affect on the wine...
For another article on the subject, look at the post on Appellation America, where some enquiring minds experimented with crystalization...unfortunately, they don't seem to ask the all important question - "is all this reproducible?"...there are side by side shots of crystals, and the conclusions are boldly stated on the basis of those pictures. But how many times did they do this? Are all the results similar, or did they cherry-pick results that reinforced the views they wanted to see? Are the results due to something like dust motes settling on the plates causing the odd patterns? I just can't see drawing these conclusions from a single set of slides, and hopefully they have plenty of other trials that were faithfully replicated on much larger scales so that they had a larger database to come to these startlingly profound conclusions...

It's one thing to draw conclusions about the state of a wine by looking at the crystals it leaves behind, but what really are you examining? The amount of acid in the wine? The amount of non-volatile compounds in the wine like tannins and color compounds in the wine? To really baqck this up, you'd have to have enough of the bottles to replicate the crystal trials, AND actually taste the wines to back up the conclusions they come to.

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Here's another article which plays up the "wonders" of BD...and has this wonderful quote:

"A small, but still dramatic, example: composting according to the actions of both lunar and solar forces. "If you want to do compost at the right time, you have to look at the earth" and the things that exert an influence upon it. "The earth is connected to the sun -- you can see that by looking at the seasons. In the springtime, it's getting warm, the plants are shooting up, growing. The earth is 'breathing out' -- exhaling, pushing. Things grow." Then, "In the summer, there's a big change -- the plants stop growing and put all their energy into the fruit. Once the fruit is picked and gone, the vines lose their leaf and go into dormancy." At that point, "You've got all this energy which is actually moving toward the center of the earth. The vegetation above the soil dies, but the soil is reawakening. The earth is 'breathing in.' That's the best time to put compost on top of the soil."

There's an even better spot in the article where the French born vinyardist for Bonny Doon states that the vines take mineral up from the soil for the "minerality" effect that some wines exhibit, but then totally contradicts himself only a moment later by saying that the vines don't actually take up minerals into the wine....

Confused, at best, would be the most charitable way to characterize the views...
Another photo from the Leflaive article (just for fun)...