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.

****************************************

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!

**************************************

One man's meat

A couple of days ago, my son and I were chatting, and he asked me if I'd ever heard about the concept of "high meat."

I told him I hadn't.  "High meat," he explained, is when people take the probiotic movement one step further, and eat meat and fish that have deliberately been left out until they are thoroughly spoiled.

It is an occupational hazard of writing here at Skeptophilia that occasionally someone will tell me about some damnfool claim, and it turns out they made it up just to see if I'll believe it.  The problem is, having written for seven years about the depths of nonsense to which the human mind can sink, it's hard for me to dismiss any claim out of hand.

After all, any species that can come up with downloadable medicines and homeopathic water is clearly capable of idiocy far beyond anything I could conceive of.

But I figured I'd hedge my bets, especially since my son has a reputation for being a bit of a wiseass at times.  (Can't imagine where he got that from.)  I said, "This is a joke, right?"

He assured me that it wasn't.  So I did some research.  And sure enough: there are back-to-nature types who are so back to nature that they want to recapture what it was like to be a hyena eating carrion in the hot sun of the African savanna.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article from the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger, wherein he visits people who have various takes on the probiotic idea, finally ending up in the home of Steve Torma of Asheville, North Carolina, who has pushed the whole thing to the ultimate.  Torma makes his own "high meat" by letting raw meat or fish decompose in jars.  Then he eats it.  Bilger writes:

Torma ducked into the back of the house and returned with a swing-top jar in his hands. Inside lay a piece of organic beef, badly spoiled.  It was afloat in an ochre-colored puddle of its own decay, the muscle and slime indistinguishable, like a slug.

Even Torma seemed to recognize that it wasn't a very appealing diet.  "The first couple of bites," Torma said, "can be rough going."

There are a variety of other sites where I found out way more about this practice than I ever wanted to know.  The site Local Harvest has directions for preparing "high meat," attributing any resistance we might have to eating said decomposed glop to "prior conditioning."  The Raw Paleo Diet Forum goes into considerable detail about consuming "high meat," and says that if you end up with explosive diarrhea after eating it, not to worry because it's just your body "purging itself of toxins."

Okay, let's see.  Where do I begin?

Cooking, and food preservation strategies in general, caught on primarily because the people who used them were less likely to die of food poisoning.  There are a lot of bacteria out there that would be very happy to make you violently ill -- E. coli, Listeria, Cryptosporidium, and Salmonella come to mind -- and since decomposition happens because of the digestion of organic matter by bacteria, if you eat decomposed food, you are approximately 1,582,614 times more likely to get bacterial food poisoning than the rest of us.

And the symptoms you get are not from the body "purging itself of toxins."  What it is doing is attempting to purge itself of the pathogenic bacteria you were stupid enough to consume.

Consider, too, that we are evolved (not "conditioned") to avoid rotten stuff.  Decomposing meat contains two chemicals -- tetramethylenediamine and pentamethylenediamine -- that are so foul-smelling that their more common names are "putrescine" and "cadaverine," respectively.  Our noses are early-warning systems, giving us valuable information that is essential to our survival.

Including, for example, "Don't eat something that smells like a putrescent cadaver, you fucking moron."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's not that the whole probiotic thing is a bad idea.  Some fermented food -- pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi, for example -- are fermented with specific strains of bacteria to produce particular flavors and odors.  These bacteria are also chosen on the basis of (1) tasting reasonably good, and (2) not killing you.  (Many of these bacteria are part of a healthy intestinal flora, which has been shown to protect you from diseases like ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.)

Eating things that have rotted with your ordinary, garden-variety bacteria, however, is a good way to spend the next few days on a first-name basis with your toilet.  There's a reason we have strict sterilization protocols for food, such as cooking, canning of vegetables, and pasteurization of milk.  It reduces the likelihood of the Bad Guys getting into your digestive tract.  Consider the FDA's stance on pasteurization: "Raw milk is inherently dangerous," their guidelines on dairy safety state.  "It should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose."

So that's unequivocal.

But if you want to try out life as a vulture, have at it.  Me, I'm gonna stick with "low meat," medium-rare, with a large glass of red wine, which not only tastes great but is much less likely to give me horrible bacterial infections.  Call me particular, but I'm just kind of finicky that way.