One reason for this uncertainty is that among the first plants to be domesticated in the Old World were the cereals: wheat and barley in the western Asia and rice in China. The deliberate production of fermented beverages clearly followed closely on cereal domestication.
Yet it may be significant that gathering grapes (or any other fruit) and fermenting their juice is a less complex process than doing the same thing with cereals, in which laborious intervention is needed to convert the starches into sugars before fermentation can proceed. Quite simply, it’s easier to make wine than beer — after all, nature does it unaided.
Such codification of alcohol use speaks directly to the inherent human tendency to give symbolic meaning to experience and ritualize behaviors of all kinds — perhaps especially those involving altered physiological states. From the earliest times, wine certainly had the supremely practical utility of easing social tensions in addition to the more symbolic but equally functional purposes of cementing reciprocal relationships and lubricating social rituals.
But they remind us also that in the ancient world, as in ours, wine drinking was often bound up with rules, rituals, and cosmic beliefs, perhaps most especially in places where it was an expensive import.
By around 2200 BCE it had become unthinkable among Egypt’s elite not to be buried with wines from the five most prestigious regions of the Nile Delta. Just as today, when wine has become a fashion accessory and an investment vehicle, in ancient times it seems that some of the best wine never got drunk!
From a variety of literary sources, we know that the Greeks learned how to concentrate the sweetness of grapes by drying them on mats before crushing them, and to harvest them early to preserve their acidity.
Noah’s first act when he disembarked from the ark was to plant a vineyard. In Christ’s time the average privileged citizen of his Judean homeland drank about a liter of wine a day.
The story goes that the young Prophet Muhammad had one day happened on a wedding at which wine was being consumed, and all the guests were happy and convivial. He left the feast murmuring blessings upon wine. But when he returned the next day, he found the place a wreck, the revelers bloody and battered from all-night drunken brawling, and revised his blessing into a curse. Thenceforward he forbade his followers to drink wine. In his view of paradise rivers flowed with this delectable liquid, but humans on earth could not be trusted to drink it without abuse.
I often wonder what the vintner buys / Half as precious as the thing he sells.
On a more populist level Benjamin Franklin wrote that “wine is a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
Also significant was the introduction, just before the war, of a federal income tax, which reduced the government’s dependence on alcohol taxes. Importantly also, the argument for prohibition was couched mainly in moral terms, something that has always appealed to Americans.
Perhaps the only ironclad rule of human experience is the law of unintended consequences, and in the case of Prohibition this unwritten rule went into operation with a vengeance. Outlawing alcohol proved to have little if any effect on the demand for alcoholic drinks; the main result of prohibiting them was to increase prices and, as with today’s war on drugs, to turn gangsters into millionaires.
For, while it is an unquestionable augmenter of the pleasures of life, this gift of the gods is also liable to hideous abuse, and has been responsible for the infliction of enormous misery. Viewed in this context, alcohol appears as a mirror for humanity itself. It is emblematic simultaneously of civilization and savagery, and it reveals the worst as well as the best in human nature. As a result, as long as alcohol produces its contradictory effects (which is to say, as long as our difficult and complex species remains in existence), human beings will continue to have a conflicted, contradictory, and complicated relationship with wine and other alcoholic drinks.
Why do human drink alcohol? Not implausibly, it has something to do with their primordial fruit-eating heritage: the scent of spontaneously fermented ethanol guided humankind’s ancient arboreal ancestors to the ripest and most sugar-laden fruit in the tree.
Honey aside, the best concentrated source of sugars is fruit.
Because alcohol is toxic to many organisms, this explanation appears plausible; and in any event the natural fermentation of sugars by yeasts has become ubiquitous. Most of the time the concentration of alcohol produced spontaneously by yeasts remain pretty low, but the phenomenon is widespread enough to help account for the fact that many different kinds of organism, particularly fruit-eating ones, possess the capacity to detoxify alcohol in small doses.
The key here is quantity. In fruit flies, large quantities of alcohol negate the benefits of small ones, illustrating a common phenomenon known as hormesis, whereby substances that are toxic to animals in large doses can have favorable or agreeable effects in small ones.
It is clear that some mammals simply like the stuff, which is hardly surprising, because elevated blood-alcohol levels appear to enhance the production of epinephrine (adrenaline), a hormone that acts in the brain to reduce inhibitions.
Humans exhibit this primate heritage in their physiology: by some reckonings, about a tenth of the human liver’s processing capacity is slanted toward breaking down alcohol via production of such enzymes as alcohol dehydrogenases.
The presence of ethanol is a better indicator of how much sugar a particular piece of fruit contains than its color is.
But keeping food around is hardly simple. Stored food rapidly rots through oxidation and other chemical processes, and it is also subject to the depredations of such pests as insects and rodents.
Deliberate fermentation can best be seen as “controlled spoilage.” Most microbes responsible for the decomposition of food cannot persist even in moderate concentration of alcohol, so Neolithic farmers were able to preserve much of the nutritional value of their crops, even if not their freshness.
But we are unperfected creatures nonetheless; and behaviorally we are still bound by what statisticians call the normal distribution. Otherwise known as the bell curve, the normal distribution simply acknowledges that most people are broadly similar in behavioral and physiological expressions, and deviations from the average become increasingly rare toward the extremes. Most people behave reasonably decently toward one another, for example, while both the saintly and the monstrous are fortunately few.
Nearly every culture recorded has figured out a way to turn sugary concoction into alcohol.
The ultimate accountant here is the universe, which likes to keep the ledger in balance.
Most of the molecules important to life on earth have evolved to be left-handed, for no better reason than that events early in the evolution of molecules dictated a general trend for all the molecules. And so it is with our six atoms and alcohol.
There are many ways in which the various elements we’ve been discussing can bind to one another, and it is this diversity that makes our world so complex, for it is the shape and spatial orientation of a molecule that largely dictates its behavior under various circumstances.
What powers living systems on earth is the energy of the sun, which is essential for plants. To make the energy their cells use, plants capture sunlight, and the hallmark of fruits such as the grape is that they are packed with polymeric sugars derived from photosynthesis, the chemical reactions that occur in the chloroplasts of plant cells.
From the point of view of wine, the most important aspect of photosynthesis is that sugars are produced as a by product of this energy transfer.
Plants have a second way of storing the energy produced by photosynthesis: namely, by removing electrons from substances such as water. The loose electrons are used to make carbon dioxide and convert it into larger carbon-containing compounds, such as sugars, that are great sources of energy. The most important of these energy source is glucose, and by making long chains of linked glucose molecules plants can store energy very efficiently. The resulting long-chain molecules may be of various kinds, including starch and cellulose. Neither tastes sweet, because both molecule are too big to fit into the taste receptors in our mouths.
We are exhorted to include lettuce and other leafy green vegetables as roughage in our diets because the cellulose is barely broken down by our digestive tracts.
Just like sugars, proteins tend to make long chains. And, as anyone who has ever had to untangle headphone wires knows, a linear array can fold and roll into a shape that is far from linear, is sometimes rigid, and is tough to unravel.
And other foods with tangy or acidic tastes, such as kimchi and sauerkraut, also use bacterial fermentation.
Many textbooks for sommeliers claim that fermentation is as easy as:
Sugars + yeast = alcohol + carbon dioxide
If only the world were this simple! This equation omits many components from both the right and the left sides.
If a rose is to be made, in most cases wine from red grapes will be left on the skins for a short period before being racked off. Some of the red pigment and flavor molecules contained in the skins can thus make their way into the wine, and the depth of color of the resulting product is roughly proportional to the amount of contact time, typically between one and three days.
Just as a major threshold in the structuring of the universe was crossed when stardust started to form atoms, another benchmark was passed when molecules began to be replicated, in a process that is basic to life itself. Nature probably tried a few ways of doing this before settling on a chemical solution using DNA, the vehicle by which most organic replication is now accomplished.
Swirl, sniff, slurp, and swallow. At every stage of this ritual your senses will be entertained: sight, smell, taste, touch - even hearing. For a liquid with such a simple appearance this multi-sensory appeal might seem remarkable. But wine is a complex concoction, and making wine requires combining many species of organisms into an intricate microbial ecosystem within which numerous delicate interactions take place. For such a subtle and nuanced product one might expect no less, and it is hardly surprising that an understanding of how wine is made takes more than a knowledge of how yeast transform the sugars in grapes into alcohol via a sequence of chemical reactions.
Let’s start with the grape. A basic wine grape consists of nothing more than embryos — seeds — surrounded by a thick fleshy casing encapsulated within a thin, tough skin.
Breeders have energetically modified virtually every feature of the vine through stringent selection of plants, and spent thousand of years training grapes to produce characteristics that meet winemakers’ precise specifications. The process is in principle much like the breeding of animals, which also has a long story; but domesticating grapes has turned out to be more like herding cats than breeding cattle. All plants are difficult to “train,” and in the end the best solution proved to be waiting for spontaneous changes in the genome that impacted how certain desired traits developed.
Usually when cloning a plant the viticulturist takes cuttings and soaks them in plant hormones that will induce roots to grow. These treatments active the root-generating genes. The rooted cutting is then planted, and since the cloning does not involve sex, the resulting vines are genetic replicas of the parent.
This over-naming usually happens when someone mistakenly gives a new name to a species that already has a name. When a plant is found to have more than one name, taxonomists use the rule of priority to decide on the appropriate name, assigning the first name used to the species and banishing all other names to the scrapheap of biological history.
And there is yet a further complication. Within any species or subspecies in which a lot of variation occurs, scientists might create yet another category. In the case of grapes, this additional category reflects that wines have been domesticated and bred into a host of what are often called varieties.
And the second observation suggested that grape growers over the ages have not created a domestic plant lacking in genetic variation. This is great news for grape growers because any crop or species with low levels of genetic variation is more prone to loss or extinction.
But much of the chemical complexity in wine is produced not simply by the grapes but by their partner, the yeast.
Yeasts are fungi. But unlike the more familiar mushrooms, they are not as easily characterized by their morphology as mushrooms are, largely because of their nondescript anatomy — which, because they are incredibly tiny, needs to be viewed through a microscope.
Because fungi are single-celled organisms, they might at first seem pretty boring. But when we examine the various lifestyles that even such simple creatures can adopt, a stunning array of species and evolutionary patterns emerges. To illustrate this phenomenon, we need look no farther than our own everyday lives. Hardly a day passes in which we don’t eat a food produced using fungal species. (Sometimes the food itself is fungal, such as mushrooms and truffles.) Fungi might also have caused some of our most uncomfortable illnesses, as well as many minor ailments such as athlete’s foot. For some, fungi might even have been the source of mind-expanding experiences: psilocybin compounds found in over 150 species of fungi are famous for the psychedelic effects.
These coats make grape seeds tough, but as a second line of defense they also contain some nasty chemicals that animal consuming the fruit would prefer not to taste. And this, of course, poses a problem for winemakers.
But the Prephylloxera blew us away with the brightness and clarity of its fruit, and what we can only describe as an extra layer of finesse.
Still, it’s hard to resist a twinge of regretful nostalgia.
Perhaps the most important single lesson to be learned from the sad saga of the phylloxera bug and the grapevine is that, if they want to continue making good wine, producers must be constantly on their guard, keeping at least one step ahead of the many organisms that are in competition with wine growers for what the vine has to offer. We can confidently expect that phylloxera will not be the last destructive scourge to infest the vineyards of the world.
In his excellent Dying on the Vine, George Gale makes a point that is of particular relevance in the US, where in far too many domains we seem to feel that we are not bound by the rules that apply to the rest of the world. He identifies “California exceptionalism” as the single most important influence in the unnecessary phylloxera debacle of the late 20th century.
These merciless forces remove particles from existing rocks and transport them to places of deposition on land or out to sea, where they accumulate. On land the accumulating sediments rapidly become colonized by a vast array of organisms, inaugurating the formation of soils: incredibly complex products of nature that vary hugely from place to place, even over short distances, as a result of intricate interactions among the minerals constituting the rocks, particle sizes, and a plethora of organic influences. And it is with the resulting variety of soils that the concept of terroir begins.
In the wine world, terroir really does matter. In its highest and costliest reaches it is sometimes virtually everything, at least as far as price is concerned. Some of the most expensive land in the world is found not in downtown Tokyo or Manhattan, but in a few little slivers of vine-covered outcroppings overlooking the country road that winds south from Dijon to Chagny, in France’s Burgundy region.
There may well be some truth to the claim that one can never fully understand a wine unless one knows the landscape that produced it, and certainly there is nothing to compare with drinking a wine in the place where it was grown and made. Many viticultural regions are breathtakingly beautiful and uplifting simply to live in.
Vines live a long time. Most winemakers expect their plants to produce for 40 or 50 years, and in some places the products of vines more than a century old are particularly prized.
For a long time now viticulturists have paid particular attention to the geological maps that indicate the kinds of rocks underlying or adjacent to their vineyards. This is because the soils of vineyards are often derived in large part from the bedrock beneath them, although they are also influenced by other rock particles that may have washed down from higher elevations.
Water is important in the weathering process, not only because of its mechanical effects and its role in dissolving limestones but also because it encourages the growth of diverse organisms.
In Burgundy, hundreds of generations of viticulturists have laboriously discovered where to grow and not to grow vines, over many centuries of trial and error. This is one reason why the “Bourgogne” (Burgundy) appellation on a bottle of wine may indicate something significant about its contents.
Here, then, we have a clear example of the observer effect, in which by scrutinizing something the observer changes it. In addition, experimental interference of the kind scientists are accustomed to doing in the lab only exacerbates the real-world problem. In any complex system, trying to control for one variable inevitably affects a host of others. Even advanced instrumentation that measures numerous different qualities in a soil sample, or a microclimate, cannot capture terroir; it still yields only some of the attributes of a particular location. What it does not do is define what makes the location special as a place for growing wine. Complicating the problem is the subjectivity of the study: people’s idea of what makes a wine good, great, or appalling can vary.
As far as the vines are concerned, what is under the soil is often at least as important as the soil itself.
Terroir is the essence of place, and one of the most important aspects of any place is its climate. This, though, can be tricky. Broadly defined, climate is the weather at a specified place on Earth’s surface, averaged out over the year — or over decades — and expressed in terms of temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, cloudiness, wind speed, and a host of other variables. Each variable is influenced by many factors, including elevation, latitude, topography, and proximity to water. But just as the average human is said not to exist, neither does the average day, nor indeed the average year.
We should realize quite clearly that without life there would be no brightness and no color. Before life came, especially higher forms of life, all was invisible and silent although the sun shone and the mountain toppled.
Sunlight, held together by water.
More importantly, what a person has heard about a wine usually influences his or her perception of it. In fact, the multimillion-dollar wine advertising industry depends on this aspect of wine appreciation.
Things appear to have different colors to us because our eyes and brains can detect very small differences in reflected light waves over a very small part of the wavelength spectrum.
There are good reasons why wine tasters routinely smell a wine before they taste it. Our sense of taste is limited (we have five basic tastes), whereas our sense of smell is complex. Smelling a wine before tasting it can enhance the variety of sensations that can be extracted from a good wine, and can help the wine taster discern immediately the differences between a good wine and an excellent one.
The first commandment is never to consume wine with garlic, spice, vinegar, or raw fruit. These foods tend to overwhelm the subtle taste of wine.
Both our senses and our common sense can be led astray by any number of extraneous factors originating in what we know, or think we know, about the wine we are drinking.
Once upon a time, the top wine critics were English. They were, by and large, aesthetes who celebrated wine as part of a much larger total experience of life. They tended to describe the wines they evaluated in relatively abstract and stylistic terms: a wine was aristocratic, lean, restrained, or voluptuous.
Like his British counterparts, Parker carefully described the wines he rated, although he used a different vocabulary, based less on style than on a wine’s immediate impact on the taste buds. Suddenly, wines were jammy or leathery; they tasted or herbs, olives, cherries, and cigar boxes. But the most important ingredient of Parker’s formula was to rate wine on a scale of 50 to 100, exactly as his readers had themselves been rated for their performance in high school.
The numeric scale gives wine ratings an aura or impartial objectivity. But, as human beings, Parker and the editors of Wine Spectator remain creatures of preference. Rating something as diverse as wine by such a system is a bit like asking someone to rate blues and yellows on the same preference scale: it can be done, but where each color tone will score entirely depends on which appeals more to the viewer. Still, there is enough agreement on what makes a wine great, or better than another, that a several-point spread will usually mean something significant to most people.
If Parker gives it over 90 I can’t buy it, and if he gives it less, I can’t sell it.
As a small molecule, ethanol is relatively impervious to the digestive enzymes that target the larger proteins. But it can damage the stomach by overstimulating the production of digestive enzymes in low doses, and by shutting down their production in high ones. Any amount of ethanol, however, will disrupt normal functioning. Food in the stomach will help by sopping up ethanol molecules and keeping them from doing too much damage, and it will also absorb the ethanol and prevent it from entering the bloodstream.
A cell’s function depends not only on receiving a continuous supply of nutrients and eliminating metabolic waste products but also on the existence of stable physical and chemical conditions in the extracellular fluid bathing it.
Ethanol has a toxic effect on the metabolism of glucose, a sugar that is an important source of energy for cells. If ethanol hits the occipital lobe in high concentrations, it will slow down the processing of glucose by some 30 percent. This means there will not be enough energy available to process accurately the images coming in from the eyes.
If only hangover had a single cause, researchers might have found a way to circumvent or alleviate them, but they result from multiple causes, making them much harder to manage.
Those who have experienced a hangover might fight it hard to believe that brain tissues and cells do not themselves have pain receptors, but that is nonetheless the case. Headaches are thus aptly named, because the brain is not what hurts. It is the pain receptors of the head and neck that are impacted.
When lots of endorphins are present, the pain receptors become numbed. As the saying goes, we “feel no pain.”
For centuries, winemakers were typically impoverished farmers who employed age-old methods using ancient equipment in gloomy cellars that were often shared with sheep, cattle, and geese.
He also demonstrated that, despite the traditional addition of sulfur salts to discourage this, the yeasts could be overwhelmed by rapidly multiplying bacteria if too much oxygen was present. This led to his key message: to produce good wine, as much oxygen as possible had to be excluded from the process. One immediate result of Pasteur’s dicta was a great advance in the quality of sparkling wines, as winemakers regularly began to add sugar and yeast after the primary fermentation to guarantee a second fermentation in the pressure-resistance bottle.
Regardless of varietal, cool-country grapes took longer to ripen. They were also leaner, more acidic, and more deeply colored and extracted. Grapes grown in warmer places ripened faster and had higher sugar contents.
Peynaud was often attacked on the grounds that his scientific prescriptions amounted to an industrial formula for a soulless, standardized product. But in reality, this acute observer was exquisitely aware of terroir, as well as the pitfalls of bad wine growing and winemaking, and he insisted that method be accommodated to place. What’s more, his approach resulted in dramatic practical improvements: Paynaud’s efforts unquestionably elevated the overall quality of wines made around the world, as much at the bottom end of the market as at the top. We are much better off for them.
Still, the scale of production also makes a huge difference, and it is remarkable how reliable large-scale winemaking operations can produce a standard product from grapes brought in from many different vineyards, sometimes kilometers apart, and makes it consistent from bottle to bottle and year to year. For a large producer developing or maintaining a brand, this consistency is important. But it will come at the cost of nuance. Remarkable good wines have been produced on an industrial scale, but no great or truly exciting ones. The ones that really engage your attention are invariably produced in small lots, usually from specific places. Under such conditions the winemaker is able to handle each batch as the individual entity it is, and tailor its treatment to its specific characteristics. Providing this intense care is not simply a function of the winemaker’s intuitive genius and experience. It also requires the ability to charge enough for the wine to cover the high costs incurred without the economies of scale available to large producers.
Some wines continued to develop complexity in the bottle. This evolution of the wine occurred as the oxygen in the air trapped below the cork — and to a minor extent diffusing through it — interacted with the compounds in the wine.
During the 1960ss appetite for these wines grew enormously, as reflected in skyrocketing prices at auction — despite the growing probability that the wines would be well past their prime because, no matter how hard and tannic a wine is to begin with, or how beautifully it may evolve in the bottle, eventually age takes a toll. Wines do not live forever.
The key to such sorry tales, as do often in confidence trickery, lies in the willing collaboration of scammer and the victims. Ignoring warning signs that had been available even before the first Jefferson bottle was sold, some of the most distinguished palates in the wine world had pronounced the fakes to be outstanding wines, elegant and durable representatives of their improbably remote period. Clearly, far too often the story was not the wines themselves but what their drinkers wanted them to be. The human brain is a mysterious organ, making connections that may or may not accurately reflect reality.
Meanwhile, the world of super-grandiose wine-collecting and flashy wine-swilling once again has egg on its face.
Looking back, we can see that the climatic history of the world has been notoriously unstable. At one time, the entire planet Earth was a frozen snowball; at another, dinosaurs lived in Antarctica.
But traditional methods of genetic engineering are both imprecise and time-consuming. They can also be frustrating, especially when the desired product does not result from a cross. Modern gene engineering techniques, however, can alleviate both the wait and the frustration.
People in EU countries are wary of GMO food products, while Australians and Americans are more receptive to them. (It is interesting to contrast this with the overwhelming acceptance in Europe of the notion of evolution, while more than 50 percent of Americans reject it.) But attitudes do change. A decade ago, Australians were dead set against GMOs; now over half of those surveyed accept them.
In the years between 1961 and 2006, the mean annual temperature in southern England increased by about 2 degree Celsius. That may not sound like much, but it is highly significant in terms of climate, being equivalent to a southern shift in latitude of over 300 kilometers. Largely as a result of this warming, a boutique wine industry is now booming in southern England.
This is of special concern in areas like Bordeaux, where reputations depend on producing wines of a particular style.