Gold standard

I have a great fondness for a glass of fine red wine or single malt scotch, but I have to admit something up front; to say I have an "undiscerning palate" is a considerable understatement.

I basically have two taste buds: "thumbs up" and "thumbs down."  I know what I like, but that's about where it stops.  On the other end of the spectrum from me are "supertasters" -- people who have a much greater acuity for the sense of taste than the rest of us slobs -- and they are in high demand working for food and drink manufacturers as taste testers, because they can pick up subtleties in flavor that bypass most people.  They're the ones we have to thank for what you read on the labels in wine stores ("This vintage has a subtle nose of asphalt and boiled cabbage; the flavor contains notes of wet dog, garlic, and sour cream, with a delicate hint of chocolate at the finish").

I make fun, but I swear I once saw a sauvignon blanc described as tasting like "cat piss on a gooseberry bush."  I had to try it.  

It was actually rather nice.  "Thumbs up."

What's always struck me about all this is how subjective it seems.  So much of it is, both literally and figuratively, a matter of taste.  This is why I thought it was fascinating that a new study has found a way to quantify the presence of congeners -- the chemicals other than alcohol introduced by the fermentation and aging processes -- which are the source of most of the flavor in wines, beers, and spirits.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pjt56, Glencairn Glass-pjt, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A paper in ACS Applied Nanomaterials, led by Jennifer Gracie of the University of Glasgow, describes a simple test for flavor in whisky using less than a penny's worth of soluble gold ions.  It turns out that the aging process for whiskies involves storing them in charred oak barrels, and this introduces congeners that react strongly with gold, producing a striking red or purple color.  The deeper the color, the more congeners are present -- and the more flavorful the whisky.

The authors write:

The maturation of spirit in wooden casks is key to the production of whisky, a hugely popular and valuable product, with the transfer and reaction of molecules from the wooden cask with the alcoholic spirit imparting color and flavor.  However, time in the cask adds significant cost to the final product, requiring expensive barrels and decades of careful storage.  Thus, many producers are concerned with what “age” means in terms of the chemistry and flavor profiles of whisky.  We demonstrate here a colorimetric test for spirit “agedness” based on the formation of gold nanoparticles (NPs) by whisky.  Gold salts were reduced by barrel-aged spirit and produce colored gold NPs with distinct optical properties...  We conclude that age is not just a number, that the chemical fingerprint of key flavor compounds is a useful marker for determining whisky “age”, and that our simple reduction assay could assist in defining the aged character of a whisky and become a useful future tool on the warehouse floor.

Which is pretty cool.  Better than relying on people like me, whose approach to drinking a nice glass of scotch is not to analyze it, but to pour a second round.  I guess there's nothing wrong with knowing what you like -- even if you can't really put your finger on why you like it.

That's why we non-supertasters rely on studies like this one to provide a gold standard to make up for our own lack of perceptivity.

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Cheers!

Humans have been making and consuming alcoholic drinks for a very long time.

We're hardly the only animal species to experience the psychotropic effects.  You may recall that about ten years ago a story from Sweden (Höme of the Majestic Mööse!  Extra points if you know the reference) in which one of the antlered behemoths got drunk eating fermented fallen apples, tried to climb the apple tree, and got stuck.  Not all species experience the same effects, though.  A 2008 study of pen-tailed tree shrews in Malaysia found that they habitually consume naturally-fermented nectar that raises their blood alcohol levels to well above the legal limit for humans, and show no ill effects whatsoever.  Presumably if they've evolved with that kind of diet, they've developed a mechanism for detoxifying the alcohol, or at least avoiding the psychological effects.  The jungles of Malaysia are thick with predators, and for a small furry mammal to spend all its time stumbling around dead drunk would be a good way to end up actually dead.

The earliest hard evidence of humans making wine or beer comes from near Jiahu, in the Yellow River Valley of China.  Pottery dating from about 6800 B.C.E. was found that had residues of fermented rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn berries; around the same time, there's evidence of grape wine and barley beer being made in the Middle East.  I've often wondered what that stuff tasted like, as compared to our refined and filtered wines, beers, and spirits a lot of us enjoy today.  Back then, they were relying on wild yeasts and bacteria to do the fermenting, and that undoubtedly led to highly variable results (and a lot of spoilage).

The written records of the Greeks and Romans certainly mention wine and beer, and (especially with the Romans) we know a good bit about their winemaking techniques.  Grape juice, sometimes flavored with spices, honey, or other fruit juices, was boiled, then filtered, poured into clay amphorae, the lids sealed with beeswax, and then buried for a period that could vary from weeks to years.  The resulting liquid was then decanted and bottled.  This was when it was discovered that the soil type, climate, and grape variety had huge effects on the outcome; Roman wines ran the spectrum from surrentine (which the Emperor Tiberius sneeringly called "generous vinegar") to falernian (so expensive it was only available to the very rich but potent -- it was not only delicious, but was aged for up to twenty-five years and had an alcohol content of around fifteen percent).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

We just learned a little more about the production of vino from an archaeological find from the harbor of San Felice Circeo, ninety kilometers south of Rome.  Wine jars were unearthed in a seabed deposit that still had residues of the wines they contained.  Both red and white wines were found, along with pollen identifiable as coming from several varieties of wild grapes that grow in the area.  (Whether the vines themselves were cultivated is unknown; but those varieties are still found growing wild nearby.)  Interestingly, the amphorae were sealed not with beeswax but with pine tar, and apparently the pine tar was used not only as a sealant but to flavor the wine itself.  Maybe the result was something like Greek retsina, which people seem either to love or hate (I like the flavor, but my wife's opinion is if she wanted to chew on a pine branch, she'd go do it).

It'd be interesting if we went back to Roman times and attended a feast, where it would fall on the spectrum between delectable and revolting.  I wrote last October about a fellow named Andrew Coletti who has tried to recreate bunches of historical recipes as accurately as possible, and found that one of the Roman dishes bore an uncanny resemblance to french fries with ketchup.  But I have no doubt that some of the food and drink would taste pretty strange to us.  I'd still want to try it, though.  I don't hesitate to try local foods when I travel, and have rarely had a bad experience, although I did draw the line at the Icelandic "delicacy" hákarl, which is fermented shark meat.  It apparently has a "strong ammonia smell," and the late Anthony Bourdain said it was "the single worst, most disgusting, and terrible-tasting thing" he'd ever consumed.  Chef Ainsley Harriott was even more descriptive, describing eating it as being like "chewing on a urine-soaked mattress."

I've heard of "acquired tastes," but that's over the line.  In fact, for me, that's so far over the line that from there I wouldn't be able to see the line using a powerful telescope.

But Roman wine?  Sure, I'd give it a go, even the "generous vinegar" one.  Who knows, maybe I'd love it.  Chacun à son goût, and all that sort of thing.  But think about this if you go out for a pint or a glass of wine with friends tonight -- you're partaking in a tradition that goes back in some form or another for thousands of years.  Pretty cool, when you think about it.

Cheers!

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Defending the vegetarians

October must be International Confirmation Bias Month, or something.

First we had the conspiracy theorists saying that a probably-Photoshopped photograph of a floating city was evidence that Project Blue Beam was targeting China with a death ray.  Then religious types claimed that there was a miraculous artifact from 9/11, in the form of a bible page "fused to a melted steel beam," despite the fact that paper, being flammable, would be awfully hard to fuse to a red-hot piece of metal.  Then we had people falling for a snake-oil cure-all called "ORMUS," one version of which turns out to be peppermint-flavored dried grass clippings.  We had a hum in Taos, New Mexico that everyone is freaking out about but which probably is nothing more than tinnitus, some erosion patterns on the Great Sphinx that have convinced some scientists that it's 200 times older than it actually is, and finally people still vehemently believing that birth order determines personality despite a study of 377,000 people that says that it doesn't.

Awfully pervasive, confirmation bias.  Not to mention frustrating.  Which is why the latest example caused me to do multiple facepalms.

It all started, as so many bogus news stories do, with Fox News.  A couple of weeks ago they ran a story called "One-third of Vegetarians Eat Meat When They Get Drunk," which claims that a study shows that 37% of British vegetarians eat meat -- and then won't admit it afterwards -- when they've been imbibing.

Well, this story got some serious traction on social media, especially amongst that subsection of meat eaters who like to think of vegetarians and vegans as holier-than-thou hypocrites.  More than one has brought up the Larry Groce song "Junk Food Junkie," about the guy who leads a double life, wearing natural fibers and eating macrobiotic health food during the day, and going out secretly for a cheeseburger at night:

In the daytime I'm Mr Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me

The story fit the narrative so well that it wasn't even questioned.

The problem is, it turns out that the study wasn't done by any kind of scientific team, it was done by a  "U.K.-based discount code website" called "VoucherCodesPro."  Initially, this wasn't said explicitly in the story, but very quickly (some) people caught on that we weren't talking about cutting-edge science.  We weren't, in fact, talking about science at all.   Even after Fox edited the article to include the source in the first paragraph, people still spread it all over the place, hee-hawing about how funny those hypocritical vegetarians are, and almost none of them questioning whether the source itself was valid.  An exposé over at the vegetarian/vegan blog The Avocadbro put it this way:

When you see all of these news outlets report the same thing, you have to assume at least one reporter—if not two, three or all of them—spent some time verifying the study. Apparently none of that happened.  Again, I’m still holding out a small percentage of hope that I’m wrong about this.  But I’m just some random Internet blogger.  It’s up to one of the many reporters who passed along these surveys to scrutinize their sources... How, apparently, did not a single one of these reporters, after they typed (or copy and pasted) the words “a survey by coupon website Voucher Codes Pro,” stop and think to themselves: What?  Is this a legitimate source?

Well, yeah.  Exactly.  And you should read the post over at The Avocadbro in its entirety, because it takes apart the Fox News claim one piece at a time -- leaving you questioning not only the results of the poll, but whether there was a poll conducted at all, or if the people over at "VoucherCodesPro" simply made the entire thing up.

Look, I'm not a vegetarian myself.  I think a t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the real pleasures in life.  I have nothing against the farming of animals for meat as long as it's done humanely, and hunting as long as it's done responsibly.

But my personal dietary preferences shouldn't lead me to accept without question an accusation of hypocrisy against people who make different choices.  Especially when the accusation is based on information that is almost certainly specious.

And man, I wish there was some way that applying the "Check your sources" rule could become mandatory before being allowed to post anything on social media.