Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.
Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spiritual insight, but that’s not enough to explain its universality in the ancient world. People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare — it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.
What’s more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.
[…]
Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities — for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”
Andrew Curry, “Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze”, National Geographic, 2017-02.
November 20, 2018
QotD: Why do we drink?
June 18, 2018
How Georgian wine survived the Soviet Union and its central planners
Last week, Atlas Obscura posted a fascinating story by Nickolaus Hines on how Georgian winemakers somehow managed to keep their craft alive during the Soviet period of mass production and mandated conformity:
Georgian Kvevri or Qvevri wine fermentation vessels. They are typically buried in the ground and grapes are fermented, then the resulting wine is scooped or suctioned out and the qvevri will be cleaned and sterilized for the next year’s vintage.
Photo by Levan Totosashvili, via Wikimedia Commons.
Qvevri are cultural metaphors, writes Keto Ninidze, Kiknavelidze’s great-granddaughter and a Georgian winemaker, in an email. Much like how someone might give birth to a child, she says, qvevri give birth to wine. And after many years of giving life, the qvevri were used as a burial place. “So in Georgian cultural perception, [qvevri are] regarded as the cycle of life and death,” she says.
Georgia has the oldest wine culture in the world, and little changed from the earliest qvevri to Ninidze’s qvevri. Everything — down to the shape of the clay pots, the method of burying the qvevri, and letting crushed grapes ferment naturally inside — is passed down from generation to generation. When the Soviet Union took control of the country in 1921, this ancient winemaking tradition was pushed underground, where it almost disappeared. During these years, Georgian winemakers lost their land or had to give over all of their grapes every harvest. If they wanted to make their own wine, they’d have to forage grapes from wild vines on hillsides, in forests, and sometimes on the sides of village streets.
Before the Soviet Union imposed their rule on Georgia, though, more than 500 different grape varieties flourished in the country’s moderate climate, tempered by its proximity to the Black Sea. Thanks to the environment, wine grapes grow without much intervention. Back then, most grapes were picked by hand and crushed by foot. The juice, skins and stems and all, were then put into qvevri.
[…]
For around six months, natural yeasts ferment the juice inside the pots. The solid parts of the grapes filter the liquid, which funnels naturally towards the bottom. Once fermentation is over, the wine is suctioned or scooped out and bottled. Or, more likely, it’s stored in smaller pots. Then the cleaning process begins. The tools of the trade have upgraded, Ninidze says, and winemakers now wash qvevri with high pressure water, ash, and citric acid, then disinfect the vessels with sulphur smoke. What hasn’t changed is the immovability. Qvevri is “something you can’t take from one place to another,” Ninidze says, adding that once a winemaker chooses a spot for their qvevri, they’re rooted there until they pass it on or buy new qvevri.
This process didn’t budge for years. Then, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Georgia in 1921. The slow, natural qvevri cycle — an extension of the Georgian lifestyle — didn’t fit Joseph Stalin’s five-year economic plans. These plans set economic goals and called for industrializing industries, including wine. Rural winemaking would need to be mechanized, and the wild-looking vines would need to be tamed. In the region of Kakheti, officials uprooted more than 500 native varieties. Steel tanks replaced the storied underground clay pots, too.
The government then redistributed and repurposed the annexed land previously used for wine, and built sterile buildings on top of them. “You see these Soviet buildings everywhere that are sturdy cement and nothing beautiful about them, but very practical,” Railsback says. “And then the Georgian [buildings] are more beautiful, and the architecture is really unique with hand-carved woodworking on the front of houses. There’s the Georgian look, and there’s the Soviet [look] that tried to demolish the culture and vibe — you feel that literally everywhere.”
During that time, families were given a single acre of land compared to the full vineyards they once tended to alongside their homes. Vines were ripped out and replaced with tidy rows of hardy, high-yielding varieties such as Saperavi and Rkatskeli. While they were plentiful and certainly sweet, they were bland and lacked the character of traditional Georgian vines. “There was one or two state factories that [processed] the whole yield of the country,” Ninidze says. “The production policy was of course industrial (especially after Stalin’s period), based on the five-year plans and neither the factories nor the farmers cared [about] the quality of the grape.”
May 31, 2018
QotD: Difficulties in using self-reported data
Nick Cohen, over in the Guardian, is busy telling us all that we must drink less and that Scotland raising the minimum price of alcohol (hitting poor people’s cheap cider and bargain booze, but not directly affecting craft lagers, appellation d’origine contrôlée wines and artisan gin) is a Good Thing because the industry makes its profits by exploiting addicts who are drinking themselves to death en masse.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that, like drugs cartels, the drink industry makes most of its money from addicts. It thrives on hooked customers, who put boosting the brewers’ profits before their and their families’ health and happiness. Sixty per cent of alcohol sales – worth £27bn a year in England – are to “increasing risk” drinkers taking more than 21 units of alcohol a week, in the case of men (about 10 pints or two bottles of wine), and “harmful” drinkers taking more than 50… Twenty one units (14 for women) does not sound much in my world of journalism, but it is a sign of people who cannot go a day without a shot of their drug, which is as good a definition of an addiction as any.
Now, there’s a question there about who decided what that “risk” was and how large it was. Cohen gets into the Salvation Army-style temperance-league apocalyptic warnings about the horrors of heavy drinking and warns that by the time you’re knocking back fifty units a week (for men, thirty-five for women) you’re undergoing “full degeneration”.
But is that based on any firm evidence? One interesting study, reassuring to the toper, can be found here, which among other things makes the gentle point that since we either under-report what we consume, or we pour away half of the booze we buy undrunk, planning policy on what we admit to consuming may not be accurate.
Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.
April 14, 2018
Alcohol and health – if you torture the data long enough, it will give you the answer you want
Tim Worstall isn’t convinced that a recent study summarized in The Lancet is either honest or useful:
We have a new study out, in the Lancet no less, telling us that the new, lower, limits for reasonable alcohol consumption are just right. Well, of course the report says that, right? The problem being that it’s entirely contrary to the more general experience we’ve got of booze consumption. For, yes indeedy, there’s a level of drinking which will – as always, on average – shorten life. But our experience to date is that it’s several times what is the current measure of safe consumption. This basic understanding of ours being that no booze lowers lifespan, too much lowers it, a modicum increases it. The argument being the definition of modicum of course.
Observation of large populations being that modicum is anything from some up to perhaps 40 or even 50 units a week. This isn’t what the current study shows at all […]
I’m not in any manner a medical expert but that does look odd. 5 million observation years on half a million people, looks like 10 years on average per person. They’re using this to predict lifespan at age 40? When lifespan at 40 is, these days, a further 40 to 50 years or so? OK, maybe there’s some sekkrit decoder ring for epidemiologists here but anyone want to try and explain it?
Ah:
We focused our study on current alcohol drinkers
So the comparison doesn’t include those who don’t drink. We’re not therefore getting a baseline of no alcohol consumption to compare with. That is, by design, the study excludes the known to be higher death rates (or lower lifespans) of the temperance types. No, really:
Third, never-drinkers might differ systematically from drinkers in ways that are difficult to measure, but which might be relevant to disease causation.
Our more general stats do indeed say that heavy drinkers (that 40 to 50 unit level perhaps) and never drinkers have about the same lifespans. Quick, gotta exclude that information, eh?
As far as we’re concerned that’s probably enough. We’ll see what Snowdon has to say about it, shall we? Because this finding is contrary to pretty much everything else we know about booze consumption. Explaining why it is will be important.
Update, 15 April: It’s no wonder that people are confused about the benefits and/or drawbacks of drinking…
What you end up with when drawing strong conclusions based on non-experimental data with selection bias, lots of measurement error and dodgy comparison groups. (h/t: @RadaWilinofsky) pic.twitter.com/iUZQbTh6sB
— Amir Sariaslan (@AmirSariaslan) April 14, 2018
March 12, 2018
How to Make Mead at Home
This Old House
Published on 22 Jan 2017Ask This Old House host Kevin O’Connor learns about the centuries-old art of making mead.
Time: A few hours of work, 1 year of aging
Cost: under $100
Tools:
FunnelShopping List:
Yeast
2x One-gallon jug
3 pounds of honey
Air lock cap
Marbles
Siphon tube
Home brewing sanitizerSteps:
1. Before beginning the home brew process, ensure the gallon jug, funnel, and siphon tube have been properly sanitized.
2. Fill up the gallon jug about a third of the way up with either tap or bottled water (don’t use distilled water).
3. Add 3 pounds of honey, then cap the solution and mix it up by shaking the jug.
4. Heat up water to 104 degrees in a pan and add yeast to dissolve it.
5. While the yeast is dissolving, you can add optional yeast nutrients to get a cleaner ferment.
6. Once the yeast is dissolved, use a funnel to pour the yeast solution into the jug.
7. Pour more water into the jug and top it off until you reach the neck of the jug.
8. Place air lock cap on top of the jug and pour a little bit of water into it to form a seal. This will prevent oxygen from getting in but will allow carbon dioxide to escape.
9. After a several weeks, once carbon dioxide has stopped releasing from the jug and fermentation is complete, it’s time to siphon the solution into a new, clean jug.
10. Ensure the siphon tub and second jug have been properly sanitized, then place the older jug higher than the new jug. Fill the siphon tube with water and gravity will pull the mead from one jug to the next. Ensure you only siphon liquid, leaving behind any solids at the bottom of the jug.
11. To fill up the void left behind from one jug to the next and limit exposure to oxygen, place a number of sanitized marbles into the new jug.
12. Place the air lock on the new jug. Leave that on for about a month and then place a regular cap onto the jug once bubbles no longer appear.
13. Leave the solution in a dark spot, like the basement for about a year for the mead to age properly.
February 8, 2018
QotD: Minimum prices for wine, a thought experiment
Consider this hypothetical (which, given the poor quality of today’s punditry and publicly discussed economics, is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem): Ostensibly to help raise the incomes of hard-working vintners of low-quality wines – vintners many of whom have children to feed and sick parents to care for, and many of whom also are stuck in their jobs as owners of low-quality vineyards – Congress passes minimum-wine-price legislation: no wine may sell for any price less than $1.00 per fluid ounce. Roughly, that means that the minimum price of a standard-sized – 750ml – bottle of wine becomes $25.00. Armed officers of the state will use deadly force against anyone and everyone who insists on disobeying this diktat.
If proponents of the minimum wage are correct in their economics, then the only effect of this minimum-wine-price diktat will be distributional. Consumers – including retailers and restaurants buying from wholesalers – will continue to buy as much wine, and the same qualities of wine, that they bought before the diktat took effect. The only difference is that, with the diktat in place, owners of low-quality vineyards earn higher incomes, all of which are paid for by consumers who dip further into their own incomes and wealth to fund this transfer. Easy-peasy! Problem solved!
But who in their right mind would suppose that a minimum-wine-price diktat would play out in the manner described above? Who would not see that a wine buyer, obliged to pay at least $25 for a standard-size bottle of wine, will buy only higher-quality wines – wines that before the diktat took effect were fetching at least $25 per bottle (or some price close to that)? Many wine buyers who before the diktat were confronted with the choice of paying either $8.99 for a bottle of indifferent but drinkable chardonnay and $25.00 for a bottle of much more elegant and enjoyable chardonnay opted for the less-pricey bottles. They did so not because they prefer to drink chardonnay that is indifferent to chardonnay that is elegant – they in fact do not have this preference. Rather, they did so because the greater elegance of the pricier chardonnay was not to them worth its higher price. So the low-quality chardonnay found many willing buyers.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-06-02.
January 9, 2018
QotD: Moderation
Three kraters [bowls used for wine] do I mix for the temperate: one to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to hubris, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to prancing about, the seventh to black eyes, the eighth brings the police, the ninth belongs to vomiting, and the tenth to insanity and the hurling of furniture.
Eubulus, attributing the words to the god Dionysus
November 25, 2017
There are all kinds of sensible recycling … this isn’t one of them
In the Guardian, Calla Wahlquist reports on a recycling initiative that we almost certainly don’t need:
At the close of the Rootstock sustainable wine festival in Sydney last year, Tasmanian distiller Peter Bignell looked around the tasting room at the carefully-spaced spittoons and thought: what a waste.
Together the spit buckets contained about 500 litres of discarded wine, which had been swilled then dumped during the two-day event.
Some wine had been dutifully spat out by responsible tasters keen to get to the end of their extensive list with tasting notes intact, but the majority was the largely untouched leavings of an overly generous pour.
It’s nothing new in the idea of using spit to make food
Peter Bignell
For Bignell, whose Belgrove distillery in Kempton, Tasmania, is the only one in Australia that runs entirely on biodiesel, all this wasted wine was hardly in keeping with a sustainable event.The obvious solution was to drink it again.
After 12 months at Poor Tom’s gin distillery in Marrickville, the spit bucket wine has been transformed into an 80-proof clear spirit that tastes something like an unaged brandy.
It is, reportedly, quite nice.
H/T to Tim Worstall, who rightly comments “Distillation will obviously have thoroughly cleaned it. But still. It’s not as if the world is short of crap wine to turn into cooking brandy now, is it?”
November 3, 2017
Don’t fall for the biodynamic woo in wine propaganda
I’m not a believer in the pseudo-mystical bullshit of biodynamic wine and I’m very strongly of the opinion that it’s 100% New Age marketing bafflegab to excuse jacking up the price of a mediocre-or-worse bottle of wine and to deflect criticism of faulty or inexpert winemaking. “Organic” wines are too often just adequate wines at a higher price point than their quality would otherwise justify. Michael Pinkus reports that he had to put up with a full-on biodynamic bullshit storm on a recent tasting in Italy:
While on a journalist junket […] I found myself at a beautiful modern winery where Daddy had obviously made a lot of euros and he wanted his offspring to have the best in their new endeavor … the winery was painfully modern and so were the levels of wines (earth, sky, air, etc) everything pointed to a winery that devotedly cared about the environment wherein it existed and did so with biodynamic winemaking techniques and practices – even the tour dripped of kale-eating and moccasin-wearing.
[…]
When it came time to taste the wines, we all sat at a long elaborate table, everything was set to impress. We started with a bottle of barely choke-downable sparkling wine … it was off-putting and oxidized, and that’s putting it mildly. I looked around the table but everybody seemed to be okay with what was in their glass. Next we tried both the whites and red from the various lines previously mentioned, with each wine seemingly worse than the next.
I turned to an older colleague and said, “Do you like any of these wines?” To which he went into an explanation about how the wines are not “typical” but laudable: “In competition these wines would not show well because they have something different about them – but once they are explained, to either the judges or eventually the consumer, these wines would show much better.”
My mind screamed “NO” while I nodded so as not to start a huge argument in front of the winemaker who had returned with yet another bottle … How in the world could this logic be true? In what world is this even right? Wine is good or it is bad and that decision is in the palate of the beholder (so to speak), but to make an argument that a wine needs a full dissertation before one can enjoy it is absurd to me and blatantly false. I’m not saying that some explanation doesn’t help in the understanding of a wine, but you should not need to fully explain a wine to make it palatable; and just because it’s bio-dynamic doesn’t automatically give the wine a pass or extra marks for trying to make the world a better place; bad wine is bad wine and no amount of explanation is going to make it better.
If you like fruit in your wine then something with lots of minerality or over the top acidity will not appeal to you, that’s a taste profile – but poorly made, off-putting, faulty or oxidized wines don’t get an A for effort just because somebody lets a white sit on skins longer, bury a poop-filled rams horn in the ground at low tide (or whatever your bio-dynamic practice may be), or because you have a fountain that swirls water in ornate patterns from a 2000 year old cistern. Ultimately taste is king.
September 16, 2017
“Mead” – The Drink That Fell From Favor
Published on 31 Aug 2017
Mead was a very popular drink during the 17th century and before, but fell out of favor by the 18th century due to the rise of Beer and Ale. Nevertheless, recipes for Mead can be found in books written in the 1700’s and today Jon goes in depth on this fascinating drink.
September 13, 2017
A visit to Creekside
Another of my favourite wineries in Niagara gets a great write-up from Rick VanSickle:
While the vast majority of Niagara wineries chart a predictable course of core varietals — Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc — the winemakers at Creekside have taken the rabbit hole less travelled and have found immense success doing it.
The steady team of head winemaker Rob Power […] and assistant winemaker Yvonne Irvine […] love the challenge of being different.
“There are guys that stick to Chardonnay and Pinot and there are guys that don’t,” says Power. “And we definitely don’t.”
Their portfolio is deep and varied and by their own admission is the antithesis of Pinot Noir/Chardonnay, mainstays in Niagara winemaking. Here it is Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and wild things that are lost and found in the darkest corners of the cellar that get top billing.
Or, as Irvine says: “We make wines we want to drink ourselves.”
The lineup here is deep in Sauvignon Blanc in every incarnation you can imagine: Stripped down bare, oaked, blended and sparkled. Syrah also plays a starring role in equally varied styles right up to the flagship wine from the winery: The Broken Press Syrah with and without the inclusion of Viognier. And, of course, the big bruiser and one of the region’s most sought-after wines, made just five times in 18 years — the Lost Barrel Red, a zany concoction of highly concentrated remains of wine and “tailings” that’s collected, stashed in a barrel and forgotten for years and years in a dark corner of the cellar only to emerge as a wine very unlike anything else made in Niagara.
Creekside has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, even has ownership as changed. And what a beat it is.
I got a front row seat to the winery’s chaotic mass of wine that was laid out in the barrel cellar to taste with Power, Irvine and retail director Britnie Bazylewski — an endless array of whites, reds and big bruisers including one red that just may be the last one in Niagara released from the hot, hot, hot 2010 vintage (that aforementioned Lost Barrel).
August 6, 2017
The allure of fine wines
Dan Rosenheck recounts his first encounter with one of those mysterious Premier Cru wines:
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So say those who have never had a whiff of 1998 Château Lafite Rothschild. In late 2011 I had been an aspiring wine connoisseur for about a year, long enough to have learned the names of the world’s most exalted beverages, but not to have tried more than a handful. Like many novices, I started out on Bordeaux, memorising the 1855 classification of the region’s reds into price tiers – called crus, or “growths” – and developing a childlike reverence for the premiers crus (“first growths”) at the top. Although there were no sub-rankings within each class, Lafite was listed first because it was the most expensive tipple in the France of Napoleon III, and my drinking buddies told me it was still considered the premier premier cru today. Chinese drinkers certainly thought so: they had bid it up at auctions to stratospheric heights after deciding, for still-obscure reasons, that Lafite and only Lafite made for an impressive gift – perhaps because its name was easy to pronounce in Mandarin, or because the estate had stuck the character for the lucky number eight on the label of its 2008 vintage.
So when a friend in the wine trade snuck me into Wine Spectator magazine’s “Grand Tasting” in New York that November, I made a beeline for the Lafite table. They were pouring the 1998: a middling harvest overall for Cabernet Sauvignon, which Messieurs Primi Inter Pares had nonetheless turned into a masterpiece. As a Frenchwoman doing her best to smile sprinkled her elixir among the parched mob, I made off with a couple of thimblefuls, and scurried to the corner of the room to stand watch over my booty.
The perfume wafted into my nostrils before I had time to lift my glass. “zomfg,” began my tasting note. (The “o”, “m” and “g” stand for “oh my God”, you can guess what the “f” is, and the “z” comes out when exuberance makes you miss the shift key.) The scents were so intense, so focused, so easy to distinguish: ripe blackcurrants quivering on the branch; cedar that conjured up a Lebanese hillside; tobacco or thyme leaves floating on the wind. How could a wine be this powerful and yet this elegant? At the tender age of 13, the 1998 Lafite did not yet offer much complexity, and its firm, astringent tannins left me puckering after every sip – the punishment a fine young Bordeaux inflicts on impatient drinkers who disturb its slumber prematurely. But oh…that smell. “I smelled this across the room,” I wrote. “I smelled this at the bar afterwards. I smelled this even when I was shoving pizza down my throat at 3am. And then I smelled it in my dream.”
My first experience of a premier cru was at an LCBO tasting in downtown Toronto. I had developed an interest in wine a few years before, so I was very excited to try some of the well-known wines for the first time. Here’s what I wrote on the old blog (no longer online) in 2008: “That’s not wine … it’s an ostentatious status symbol”
At some point, an expensive bottle of wine stops being just wine and starts being primarily a status symbol. Case in point:
Staff were delighted at the sale and the three customers were eager to taste the £18,000 magnum of Pétrus 1961 — one of the greatest vintages of one of the greatest wines in the world — which they had reserved from the cellars several weeks before.
Unfortunately, the guests at Zafferano in Knightsbridge proved to be a little too discerning.
As the magnum was uncorked, they declared it to be a fake, refused to touch the bottle and sent it back.
I enjoy wine, and I’m usually able to appreciate the extra quality that goes with a higher price tag … up to a limit. The most expensive wine I’ve tasted was a $400 Chateau Margaux, which was excellent, but (to my taste anyway) not as good as a $95 bottle I sampled on the same evening (a Gevry-Chambertin). Wine is certainly subjective, so my experiences can’t be easily generalized, but I think it would be safe to say that the vast majority of wine drinkers would find that their actual appreciation of the wine tapers off beyond a certain price point.
If you normally drink $15-20 bottles of wine, you’ll certainly find that the $30-40 range will taste better and have more depth and complexity of flavour. Jumping up to the $150-200 range will probably have the same relative effect, but you’ve gone to 10 times the price for perhaps 2-4 times the perceived quality. Perhaps I’m wrong, and the $1,000+ wines have transcendental qualities that peasants like me can’t even imagine, but I strongly doubt it. Any wine over $500 has passed the “quality” level and is from that point onwards really a “prestige” thing.
Update: A commenter at Fark.com offered this link as counter-evidence:
“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating non-intrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”
This is why wines are generally tasted blind for comparative purposes (that is, with no indication of the wine’s identity provided). It’s a well-known phenomena that people expect to enjoy more expensive things than cheaper equivalents.
You can try this one for yourself: next time you’re pouring a beer or a wine for a guest, hide the container and tell them that what you’re pouring is much more rare/expensive/unusual than what it really is. Most people, either from politeness (they don’t want to be rude) or fear of being thought ignorant (that they can’t actually perceive this wonderful quality) or genuine belief in what you’ve said, will go along with the host’s deception and praise the drink as being so much better than whatever they normally drink.
Human beings are wonderful at rationalizing … and self-deception.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the original link.
July 20, 2017
Latest warnings about climate change to mean higher wine prices … maybe
London’s local Metro newspaper recently published a scary article about rising temperatures in wine regions across the world and the likelihood of driving wine prices much higher. Colour me skeptical, frankly. Also of a doubting disposition, Paul Austin Murphy indulges in a good, old-fashioned fisking of the alarmist article:
Now here, in all its glory, is a supremely tangential link (found in a Metro article called ‘Global warming is now messing with wine, so can you PLEASE STOP WRECKING THE WORLD‘):
Global warming is “going to up the price of wine across the board”.
Readers may want to know the details about this fatal connection between man-created global warming and the high price of wine. Though — it must be said straight away — this can’t always the case at present. It must surely depend on which wines you like and where you buy your wine from.
Anyway, this is the hard science bit; so pay attention and put your white coats on. Here goes:
“Researchers have suggested that rising temperatures in Europe are likely to increase the cost of labour in vineyards, noting that as heat rises in August, a month when a significant amount of the harvest is brought in, there’s a 15% drop in the amount of time labourers are able to work.
“There’s also a drop in productivity, slowing down the wine production process.”
That’s odd. On average heat always rises in August in most European countries. Metro doesn’t really make it clear if these natural — as well as annual — increases have themselves increased. It also says that “[r]esearchers have suggested”. Yes, they’ve suggested. That’s a very loose word. Though it’s obviously a very precise and important word if you like your wine and you’re also against man-caused global warming.
It’s also the case that in several European wine-producing countries, cold weather is much more of a problem for the wine industry than hot weather (France, in particular). A “hot” vintage in France is very often associated with extremely high quality wine from that vintage.
Another study has admitted that this catastrophic effect on wine production hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. Metro says:
“Andreas Flouris of the School of Exercise Science at the University of Thessaly reckons that the results of the small-scale study could easily repeat in California, across Europe, and in Australia — so all our wine could be set to hike up in price.”
Now if this wine catastrophe hasn’t yet happened in “California, across Europe, and in Australia” — then where, exactly, has it happened? The initial study mentioned that “most European countries” have been effected by it. (Which ones?) This other study says that it hasn’t yet occurred “across Europe.” How do we make sense of these two seemingly contradictory phrases?
It’s not just about cost. (Though, for Metro, it’s mainly about the cost!) This is also about taste. Metro tells us that
“[i]ncreased heat is also affecting the taste of wine, damaging the quality of grapes across Europe and shortening the growing season”.
All this — if true — will also affect prices. Shorter growing seasons will certainly affect the price of wine — or at least certain wines from certain countries. This is strange. One main reason why the United Kingdom doesn’t produce much wine is its shortage of warm weather. (British wine makes up 1% of the domestic market.) Yet if temperatures keep on increasing, then surely more wine will be produced in England. That will also have a positive effect on the price of wine! Why doesn’t Metro mention that?
Now what’s all this going to do to London’s dinner-party circuit? I mean Metropolitans are already suffering from severe “austerity”. Add 50 pence (or less) to a bottle of wine and then what have you got? Massive poverty among London’s professional political Pharisees (who also like wine).
It’s fascinating that the Metro author tries to imply that hot weather in (parts of) Europe will somehow have a knock-on effect in California and Australia, isn’t it? The two latter wine-producers are known for their consistency between vintages, because they are warm-weather regions where the grapes are generally able to mature to full ripeness every year almost without fail. Cool climate regions (like Ontario, for example) have much greater variation from vintage to vintage because the local weather varies significantly and the grapes are not always able to fully ripen before they have to be picked (this is more true of red than white grapes, which tend to ripen sooner and can be picked earlier than the red grapes).
July 17, 2017
Debunking some myths about sulfites in wine
By way of Scientific American, here’s a bit of clarity from Monica Reinagel about the issue of sulfites in both red and white wine and what relationship it has to wine headaches:
Myth #1: Organic or bio-dynamic wines are sulfite free.
In order to be certified organic, a wine must not contain added sulfites. However, sulfites are produced naturally during the fermentation process as a by-product of yeast metabolism. Even though no sulfites are added, organic wine may contain between 10-40 ppm sulfites.
You may also see wines labeled as being made from organic grapes, which is not the same as organic wine. Wine made from organic grapes may contain up to 100 ppm sulfites.
If you do get a hold of wine made without sulfites, I don’t suggest keeping it in the cellar very long. Wine made without sulfites—especially white wine — is much more prone to oxidation and spoilage.
Myth #2: Red wine is higher in sulfites than white wine
Ironically, the exact opposite is likely to be true. Red wines tend to be higher in tannins than white wines. Tannins are polyphenols found in the skins, seeds, and stems of the grapes. They also act as antioxidants and preservatives so less sulfite is needed.
In fact, while European regulations allow up to 210 ppm sulfites in white wine, the limit for red wine is only 160 ppm.
Other factors that affect how much sulfite is needed are the residual sugar and the acidity of the wine. Dryer wines with more acid will tend to be lower in sulfites. Sweet wines and dessert wines, on the other hand, tend to be quite high in sulfites.
Myth #3: Sulfites in wine cause headaches
The so-called “red wine headache” is definitely a real thing. But it’s probably not due to sulfites. For one thing, white wine is higher in sulfites than red wine but less likely to cause a headache. That suggests that it’s probably something else in red wine that’s responsible for the notorious red wine headache. Other candidates include histamines, tyramine, tannins, not to mention the alcohol itself!
May 12, 2017
“Maybe this is creeping privatization after all. It’s certainly worth a shot”
Chris Selley on the neither one thing nor the other state of alcohol retailing in Ontario:
On Tuesday the government enumerated 76 new Ontario supermarkets where, by Canada Day, you will be able to buy beer. That will make a total of 206 Ontario supermarkets where you can buy beer — an artificially limited selection of beer, only in six packs and singles and only during the same bankers’ hours as the LCBO and Beer Store. But still. That’s about one-third as many supermarkets selling beer as there are LCBO outlets selling beer; add in the 212 rural agency stores that sell wine, liquor and beer, and you’ve got almost two-thirds as many private enterprises selling beer as you have government bottle shops.
This could help prove several useful concepts that deserve much wider acceptance in Ontario. One is that it’s very easy for the government to make money off liquor sales without retailing liquor itself. Indeed, it’s easier; that’s why so many governments do it. The supermarkets buy the beer wholesale from the LCBO; the LCBO doesn’t have to worry about paying civil servants to sell that beer or running the stores.
Another is that the private sector can be counted on to keep liquor out of children’s hands. Indeed, with inspections and draconian fines in place, it can probably be trusted more. My observations suggest LCBO employees certainly card everyone who should be carded, but it’s nothing like it is in the U.S. I’m almost 41, not in especially good nick, and I still get asked about half the time.
Might Ontarians develop a taste for all this convenience? The hard cap on beer-in-supermarket licences is 450; having doled them all out, including agency stores, that would mean about half the liquor outlets in Ontario were privately run. And people might start to notice the bizarre inconsistencies: why can the Walmart on Bayfield Street in Barrie sell only beer, and only in six packs, while the Walmart on Hays Boulevard in Oakville can sell beer and wine, and meanwhile Hope’s Foodland in Novar, Mac’s Milk in Craigleith, Redden’s campground in Longbow Lake and Lac des Mille Lacs Bait and Tackle in Upsala can sell beer, wine and hard liquor — and smokes and fireworks and beef jerky and bread and eggs? Why can scores of convenience stores sell everything alcoholic as agency stores, but other convenience stores aren’t even eligible to apply for the new wine and beer licences?
