Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Got Zin? Every year around Superbowl weekend, a few thousand Zinfandel enthusiasts trek to San Francisco for the annual ZAP Festival. ZAP stands for Zinfandel Advocates and Producers. I am a card carrying member and like to think of myself as a ZAP-bar (Zinfandel Advocate and anti-Producer). The festival is held at the Fort Mason Center in two huge warehouses that stick out on piers into the Bay. It is the largest wine tasting in the world! Roughly 300 wineries come and pour their stuff and it amounts to around 1000 different wines to taste, all in a single afternoon.

OK, even I admit, that’s impossible. The trick is to remember that this is a tasting and not a drinking festival. The wineries pour tastes, not glassfuls. There are spit buckets everywhere and in theory one is supposed to take a taste and spit rather than swallow. Although I doubt if anyone spit out the Turley Hayne Vineyard which retails for $75/bottle and is impossible to find. I had 3 tastes of that…had to calibrate my tastebuds, ya know. At the end of the day, I tasted about 50-60 wines and spit about half of them.

This year was my 13th festival and I have a Zinfandel Festival tasting routine. First, it’s essential to eat a large lunch. Never taste on an empty stomach. Second, I arrive early, about 30-45 minutes before the doors open. The line is manageable at that point, but quickly grows to a disaster if one is any later. Once I’m inside, I head straight for Turley. I like to calibrate my tastebuds with one of my favorite wines. That way, if anything else I taste afterwards holds up, I know it’s good juice. I try to taste a balance of wines that I know and wines that I don’t. I also like to taste the really expensive ones that I can’t afford to buy (like the Hayne Turley…). Afterwards, I walk around the city, take some blurry photographs, have some coffee, and eat dinner before driving home.

What is special about Zinfandel that causes thousands of fanatics to come from all over and attend this event? Besides the fact that it just plain tastes good, of course? Zinfandel is known as America’s Heritage Grape and is basically grown only in California. The origin of Zinfandel has been the subject of much scientific investigation and puzzlement and the quest makes for an interesting story. Hypotheses that it originated in the US were long-time favored. Researchers later discovered that Zinfandel is a genetic match to Primitivo, grown mainly in the boot of Italy. However, Primitivo has only been grown in Itlay for 150-200 years, which is a short time in the history of wine, so it seemed unlikely that it was Zinfandel’s true parentage. Researchers speculated that perhaps Primitivo was brought across the Adriatic Sea from Croatia. Bingo! In 2001, scientists working in the field in Croatia and at the Enology lab at UC Davis found a perfect DNA match between Zinfandel and the rare old Croatian grape of Crljenak Kastelanski. Other Croatian varieties such as Plavac Mali and Dobricic are Zinfandel’s brothers and sisters. It was first imported into the US in the 1820’s by a nursery on Long Island. I’m glad they changed the name – you gotta admit that Zinfandel is much easier to pronounce.

Zinfandel is grown in every wine region in California and some “old-vine” vineyards date to the 1880’s. Needless to say, there is a special taste to Zinfandel made from 100-yr old vines. Old-vine Zin yields characteristics like graphite, licorice and slate, and is often very spicy — mainly pepper – and earthy. These old vineyards tend to be known by name. Just mention the words Pagani Ranch, Geyersille, Duarte, Monte Rosso, Dickerson, or Grandpere and a Zinfandel lover’s eyes will light up. Newer vines tend to give a more jammy or plumy taste.

So, what were the new finds from the tasting? Sidejob Cellars was pouring their very first bottling and it held up well to the Turley. It will be released in March. They are so new, they don’t even have a website yet. Plungerhead Vineyards won the award for the best name and offered a good quality to price ratio. Another lesser-known favorite is Macchia from the Lodi area.

For people wanting to get started with Zinfandel, I recommend the three R’s: Ravenswood, Ridge, and Rosenblum. All 3 have a diverse set of bottlings at a variety of costs, starting with a Vintner’s Cuvee, then blends from a single County, and then single vineyard bottlings including some 100-yr old vines. It’s a great way to be introduced to the many variations of this marvelous grape!

Oh, and by the way, it goes without saying, of course, that Zinfandel is a red wine.

For those of you who had better things to do than read blogs over the holidays, you missed out on the story everyone was linking to: this ten-part expose of the Noka chocolate company. It was a well-done piece, by someone who really knows his chocolate.

Apparently there is an important distinction between “chocolate makers” and “chocolatiers.” The former actually pick the cacao beans and turn them into chocolate, while the latter will buy basic chocolate (”couverture”) from someone else and turn it into truffles or into whatever other form you prefer your dark sinful goodness. A pretty good system, overall; no shame in representing either half of the pipeline, although many manufacturers do serve both functions. Noka is a chocolatier — one of the most expensive in the world. Hundreds of dollars per pound, minimum.

The problem is that Noka pretends to make their own chocolate from scratch, even though they don’t. They don’t quite come right out and lie, but they shamelessly weasel around the truth, trying to give the impression that they’re out there picking beans themselves. Unlike other chocolatiers, who are perfectly happy to reveal who is providing their raw chocolate, Noka keeps it a closely-guarded secret.

But there aren’t that many chocolate makers in the world, and Noka does make a long list of claims about its chocolate — enough, as it turns out, to uniquely pin down who their supplier is! It’s a tiny French company named Bonnat. Apparently, Noka doesn’t even do a very artful job at turning their couverture into delectable truffles; they just melt it down and squeeze it into different shapes. And then sell it at a markup of anywhere from 1,000% to more than 6,000%. But you do get a pretty sweet stainless-steel box, if you go for the more expensive stuff.

All in all, a nice bit of investigative reporting, and a pretty damning indictment of Noka’s spin machine. But I was frustrated by a couple of aspects of the expose. Most obviously, with all of the elaborate effort that the author (credited only as “Scott”) went to test and characterize Noka’s chocolate, at no time (apparently) did he directly address the most important question — how good does it taste? The impression is given that it can’t possibly taste any different from the basic chocolate one could purchase directly from Bonnat, and here and there a disparaging comment about Noka’s presentation is thrown in. But really, the entire point is how it tastes, no? I’m ready to buy the argument that it can’t possibly live up to the hype, but I’d like to see that hypothesis explictly tested, with a blind taste test or some such thing.

The other issue is more subtle, and almost certainly unintentional on the part of the author, who is clearly a chocophile. Unavoidably, by revealing the pretense behind a fancy-schmancy chocolate operation, the expose will confirm the suspicions of those who think that the whole concept of boutique chocolate is a scam, targeted at yuppies with more money than sense. Or any boutique food product, really. There are people out there — I won’t name names — who harbor a lingering suspicion that anything more upscale than a good Hershey’s chocolate bar is just an exercise in name recognition, totally divorced from considerations of quality. And that kind of talk makes my sensitive elitist-snob blood boil.

Not that they’re always wrong. One area in which quality definitely matters, I think we can all agree, is fine single-malt Scotch whisky. My own introduction to the pleasures of good whisky came, at all places, at a cosmology conference. It was in Britain (of course), and as an evening’s entertainment the conference hosted a whisky tasting. It was presided over by a gentleman from J&B, who guided us through sips of several different single malts. Even to my untutored palate, the differences were unmistakable, and I was hooked. But the J&B guy, speaking in a charming Scottish accent, told a revealing anecdote: at one point they had a specific blend being sold only in Japan, which was suffering from disappointing sales. So they changed the name, slapped a different label on the same whisky, and tripled the price. Sales skyrocketed. Sometimes it really is about the cachet.

Other times, it’s not. Which I will proceed to rigorously prove by means of a counter-anecdote. I was having dinner with a friend at a fancy restaurant, the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in Chicago. She ordered the wine, keeping its identity a surprise by asking for it by the number on the wine list rather than by name. The bottle was brought to us by a different server, who offered it to me for tasting and inspection (being that I was the guy, naturally). This wine was — amazing. Words fail me. Robust and spicy and deep, with a profound elongated finish, but at the same time subtle and multi-layered, not merely an overly-alcoholic novelty trick. We both agreed it was the best wine we had ever tasted.

So we were enjoying the wine, when she proudly says “I knew you’d love this Barolo.” To which I replied, “What are you talking about? This is a California Cabernet.” Which claim was revealed, by inspection, to be true. And which, rather than causing some minor bemusement, filled us with fear. Obviously we had the wrong bottle, but had we made a mistake in ordering by number? This was a fancy place — she was trying to order a $100 bottle of wine, but there were plenty on the wine list that broke the $1000 barrier. And we didn’t really want to spend the rest of the evening washing dishes.

So, with some trepidation, we asked to peek at the wine list again. Turns out that the bottle we were drinking came in at $300 — not what we had meant to spend, but not completely obscene. And we hadn’t, in fact, ordered the wrong number; there was a mistake on the printed wine list, and two completely different bottles had the same number. Fortunately, this being a classy place, the wait staff was horrified that we hadn’t received what we had ordered, and offered to replace it (we declined), and wouldn’t think of charging us the more expensive price.

But the relevant point here is: paying a lot of money really does buy you quality, sometimes. This was a pretty good blind experiment, since we had no idea what we were drinking. I’ve had a few $100 bottles of wine in my day (not too many — I don’t move in those circles), and this was unmistakably better. Now, we can argue whether the increase of quality as a function of price is really linear, or something closer to logarithmic. But don’t you dare start arguing that there’s some non-outlandish threshold above which everything tastes just as good, no matter how much you pay. Sometimes, if you want the truly good stuff, you have to fork it over.

Now go out there and indulge in some good chocolate! What are you waiting for?

If you are a scientist looking for a place to get a drink in Melbourne, you could do worse than visit The Croft Institute. This is a seriously freaky establishment that you get to by going up an alley that runs off another alley.

These are very dodgy surroundings indeed, and you are surprised when you finally enter the bar itself and find it to be a nice-looking, although odd, place. It is odd because, as described on their website

The Croft Institute is hidden up a series of laneways, on a site that was previously vacant for over two decades. Set over three floors, The Croft Institute houses a laboratory on the ground floor, a hospital themed waiting area and bathrooms on the middle level and a 1930’s styled gymnasium on the top floor.

There also used to be a licensed vodka distillery on the first floor, but when I visited there the other night (I only looked at the first floor) the bar staff told me they didn’t make their own vodka any more. Nevertheless, they made me a reasonable martini and served it in a proper glass, not a beaker, as I had half expected.

There are a few nice long, low couches to sit on, but the rest of the seating is on lab stools, pulled up to lab benches. It distinctly reminded me of being in high school chemistry class, because all the equipment is getting on a bit.

It is definitely a quirky place, and it got me thinking a little about other bars that must exist around the world, dedicated to science, or at least with science as a theme. If you know of one, please let us in on it in the comments.

For me, espresso is an integral part of every day. I typically start the day with a regular coffee, but then move on to an espresso mid-morning at work, followed by another either mid-afternoon or when I get home from work. I wouldn’t call myself a real coffee connoisseur, but I certainly know what I like, and for my money you just can’t beat a perfect cup of espresso with coffee in any other form.

I’m certainly not alone in this, and many of my colleagues and friends are more knowledgeable about coffee and are even more devoted to it than I am. But, as scientists, we are seldom happy with a gut reaction, and you’ll always find us seeking the why and how. For example, you’ll notice that I used the phrase “a perfect cup of espresso” above. What does that mean? What constitutes a “perfect” espresso, and how can one ensure getting it every time? A real answer begs for experimentation, a healthy dose of hypotheses, more experiments, refined hypotheses, …, – you know what I’m talking about.

Most of us coffee lovers focus, understandably, on the (uncontrolled) experimental part of this process, find what we like, and just live with the fact that we don’t really know what’s behind it. But if you’ve got enough scientist in you, you’ll never be completely happy with this, and will yearn for a more complete understanding. Luckily, such a scientific analysis exists!

Ernesto Illy is a fascinating character. If you know coffee, you’ll recognize his name from the highly successful Trieste-based coffee company, illycaffè, of which he is the Chairman. However, equally relevant to the topic at hand is that Illy holds a doctorate in chemistry and a background in molecular biology. He is fascinated with the science of coffee, and in June 2002 he wrote a wonderful article for Scientific American, titled The Complexity of Coffee (The article requires a subscription, but is also available on Illy’s website).

Since coffee comes in many forms, Illy focuses on espresso as a specific example. He discusses the importance of the perfect beans, what that means, and the role that modern technology is playing in improving speed and quality control in attaining them. He then talks about roasting, in terms that are music to a scientist’s ear

… residual water inside each cell is converted to steam, which promotes diverse, complicated chemical reactions among the cornucopia of sugars, proteins, lipids and minerals within [...]. At high heat, from 185 to 240 degrees Celsius, sugars combine with amino acids, peptides and proteins according to a well-known caramelization process called Maillard’s reaction. The end products are brownish, bittersweet glycosylamine and melanoidins— which give rise to coffee’s dominant taste—along with carbon dioxide (up to 12 liters per kilogram of roasted coffee)

One part I particularly enjoy is the chart titled Cumulative Chemical Composition of Espresso with Increasing Extraction Time, which simultaneously tracks the concentrations of multiple compounds as a function of extraction time, side by side with a key that explains their role

Compound : Aroma
2,4-decadienal : RANCID
ethylgujacol : SMOKE
2-ethyl-3,5-dimethylpyrazine : CHOCOLATE
2-ethyl-3,6-dimethylpyrazine : CHOCOLATE
2,4-nonadienal : RANCID
methylsalicilate : CINNAMON
b-damascenone : TEA
DMTS : SULFUR
isovaleraldehyde : SWEET
a-ionone : FLOWERS
linalool : FLOWERS

But what I learned the most from was the discussion of the crema. When I make espresso at home, I’m deeply disappointed if I can’t achieve a wonderfully oily golden foam that I know, from experience, will correspond to a delicious cup.

Referring to this image, Illy explains -

the dense, reddish-brown foam that tops an espresso, is shown in an enlarged cross section. Composed mainly of tiny carbon dioxide and water vapor bubbles (large circles) surrounded by surfactant films, the crema also includes emulsified oils containing key aromatic compounds (particles with red borders) and dark fragments of the coffee bean cell structure.

and goes on to explain why the color, bubble size and thickness of the crema are all indicators from which one can discern the quality of the coffee.

The complete article is an absolute joy, and, although I brew his coffee and use one of his machines, I am most thankful to Ernesto Illy for revealing the science behind my favorite daily drug.

This will be old news to some people, but when I was back in England last week they were showing Guinness television ads that were short parts of an older ad that I had never seen, but about which my parents were raving. Fortunately, all things are available online, and this one is well worth seeing.

The ad combines two things I hold dear; a perfectly pulled pint of Guinness, and the theory of evolution. As described on the Guinness web site:

It starts with three friends enjoying a GUINNESS® beer in their local pub. We then follow them on an extraordinary backwards journey. The three guys travel back through time, as they walk they seamlessly go back down the evolutionary chain. They turn into Neanderthals, then apes, mammals, prehistoric fish, small dinosaurs and strange mole like creatures before ending up as mudskippers somewhere near the dawn of time. They take a sip from a muddy puddle and react in disgust.

Brilliant!

Ahhh….London. All of a sudden, here I am in South London. It is early in the morning, and everyone is still asleep. I’m sitting here with an excellent cup of tea (title of this post refers to this other post) and a plate of Jacob’s cream crackers (since I’m desperately hungry and it was the only thing I could find without disturbing my host’s kitchen cupboards) and looking at lovely cloud patterns through the window, and some beautiful shafts of morning sunlight from time to time. And I’m listening to the birds…. and some seriously loud snoring from upstairs.

Would not have predicted that I’d be here at this time. Tuesday saw me doing hectic things at work back in LA, as usual. Then I decided. I called the airline, got a seat, and that afternoon (after a mad dash across town, making it to the gate one minute before the flight closed) saw me in the air, headed to London.

And here I am. Purpose of trip? Just to be there for my sister, Carol, who yesterday was giving birth to her first child. All went well. Hurrah! We are an Uncle, again.

What else shall I do while here? Well, I’ve got jetlag, my laptop, and a wireless connection and I’ve three more papers to be working on, using this convenient setup – one came out last week; I’ll be telling you about that physics very soon – and I’ve got several other writing projects to work on…. and I will probably be helping out with things like shopping and other errands from time to time.

And then, when I can get away, I think I’ll go to some old haunts to drink it all in, such as South Kensington, Bloomsbury, and Soho. I’ll go to a John Lewis to buy some household items like one or two more pieces of the Denby Greenwich dining set and a set of placemats and coasters, have a look in some museums and bookshops, and -oh yes- I’ll definitely buy some essential food items to take back with me: Green and Black’s chocolates, Maldon Sea Salt, good English Breakfast tea, etc, etc. (Must also remember to get some Hendrick’s gin on the way back through Heathrow.) See here for a previous haul my mum brought me when she visited last.

Sure, I could get all that latter stuff (but not the gin) from one of the English shops in Santa Monica. But it is such an effort to go all the way over to the West Side. If I’m going to go all the way over there, might as well go all the way to London.

Time for another cup of tea.

-cvj

Wanna smell like dirty socks? Old fashioned folks may opt to forego doing their laundry, or wear weeks-old clothes from a gym locker. But the in crowd has a new option: a perfume based on the aroma of Stilton cheese! Yep, kid you not, the Stilton Cheese Makers Association commissioned an aromatics firm to create Eau de Stilton. It is part of their Stick on the Stilton 2006 campaign, to encourage people to eat more Stilton cheese. The perfume is described as featuring a

symphony of natural base notes including Yarrow, Angelica seed, Clary Sage and Valerian

And the manufacturer claims the scent is more “earthy and fruity” and not like “old socks.” A Stilton association spokesman was quoted as saying:

Blue Stilton cheese has a very distinctive mellow aroma and our perfumer was able to capture the key essence of that scent and recreate it in an unusual but highly wearable perfume

A rather brave female employee of the manufacturer tried out the product and noted

I’ve had the perfume on all day and none of the men complained.

I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion I sport perfume, I’m looking for a little more than “nobody complained.” I wonder if it makes people hungry? Perhaps a new form of aromatherapy – a perfume that makes you eat cheese?

The cheesemakers are approaching a British model/actress Cat Deeley to hawk the product, with the theme The Cat that got the Cheese (groan…). For those cheese-lovers out there , the perfume will be available on the official Stilton cheese website above. Personally, I’m holding out for Eau d’Epoisse – if you’re going to smell like dirty socks, you might as well go all the way!

That’s the debate that sprung up in the comment thread of a recent post. We’ve all seen the boxed beverage labeled as wine sitting on retailer shelves, but the issue is whether it actually qualifies as wine. CV readers decided that an experiment needed to be performed to settle the issue. This is a science blog, afterall. Being a theorist, I already had my favorite model to describe the outcome of this experiment – namely, wine does not come in boxes. So I was disqualified from participating in the analysis.

Luckily, one brave CV reader, Elliot, stepped up to the challenge. Here are the results, in his own words:

Before I share the results of the wine tasting experiment with boxed wine, I should do a bit of level setting on the experimental apparatus. (me)

I am by no means a wine expert. However I have developed (over many years) a sense for what I like and what I don’t. I exclusively drink red wines mostly Merlot and Cabernet from Calif. I like some reds from France as well. My favorite grocery store selection is Clos DuBois vineyards. I tend to like stuff in that price range and up, where and if the wine is in the $5-$10 range, I really don’t care for it that much.

With that said, I went to Wild Oats and got a “box” of French Rabbit Cabernet.

Bottom Line: It was horrible. I wouldn’t give it to my dog.

Now there was another “wine in a box” choice appropriately named Black Box wine. My gut feel was that it might be better but the smallest container was the 3000 ml or 4xbottles. So I backed away.

Thank you Elliot for settling this question! My theory is confirmed – wine does not come in boxes!

I was talking with a friend over dinner last night about Death Valley (she’s leaving for a trip there soon) and this reminded me of the fact that I was supposed to do a few more posts on my recent “off-planet” trip to the same place. So here goes:

Why Do I Need All That Other Stuff Day.

Right now you’re thinking, “Why do I need all that other stuff?”. It’s the feeling you get (for a while) when you’re out in the desert, just you and the tent, and the stuff on the picnic table. You’re cooking asparagus to go with your red pepper and avocado salad, to have as a side with your delicious stewed chicken (with a bit of red wine in the sauce) on a bed of couscous. You’re feeling content with the world (the sandstorm of the night before that filled every crevice with sand while you were trying to put up your tent in the middle of it is just a distant memory), and the sun will soon set, beautifully, behind the mountains to the West.

Ahead of you to come that evening is some quality thinking on a full belly, some dozing by a crackling campfire, the murmur of other campers in the (you hope) distance, the small chunk of dark chocolate you’ll break off the bar you brought…. and that single slow-burning shot of the 15 year old Dalwhinnie that you always treat yourself to later in the tent when on a camping trip, before eventually blowing out the candle lamp and sleeping.

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I was at a particularly good dinner party on Saturday night over on the West Side. It had a little under a dozen people, from professionals in academia and surrounds (such as relativist Kip Thorne of Caltech, or Legal scholar and writer/broadcaster Jonathan Kirsch) to professionals in entertainment (such as writer/performer Julia Sweeney), and journalism (such as South African Journalist and Activist Zubeida Jaffer) and several other fields…. and a good time was had by all. I only had to explain string theory and the whole of particle physics three times (to three separate groups; and I was glad for the opportunity to do so) so I managed to get some food and wine down. I’m not sure if my biggest moment was convincing the razor-sharp Julia Sweeney that maybe she does not hate string theory quite so much any more, or whether it was just finding ourselves enthusiastically in agreement over public transport issues in LA (i.e., it exists, if only people would use it more! Well, you’ve heard me on this topic a lot…..)…this is a big deal to me since a lot of people never want to talk about this matter. We also spoke a lot about getting more science into the entertainment/media realm as well (you’ve heard me on that topic a lot too) a subject we agreed was worth pursuing…

It turned out that a couple at the party could not use their tickets for the Sunday afternoon concert at the Disney Hall, and they gave them to me. This was rather nice since I’d been thinking that it would have been nice to go to the concert. All I had to do was find someone in the short time available (Sunday morning; concert was at 2:00pm) to take with me to use the extra ticket. This was a challenge (combination of it being a sleep-in day with the time change, and me not being terribly flush with contacts who I can call on for that purpose at short notice…..people my age often come in bound states, and/or they’ve planned to do stuff on the precious Sunday afternoons that you only get once a week) but I succeeded. At 2:00pm, we were in our seats, waiting for the first half:

The concert was the last in the Los Angeles Philharmoic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” series. It was excellent, (although I beg to differ with the “minimalist” moniker for those particular pieces). The whole concert was conducted by John Adams, and the first part was a Phillip Glass piece (or set of pieces; selected scenes from his opera Akhnaten, in fact), while the part after the intermission was John Adams’ own Harmonielehre. It was an afternoon of wonderful music, overall. I particularly loved the opera (even with the rather silly words in places), which was beautifully orchestrated with a small configuration of the orchestra (it was in fuller configuration later for the second piece).

There was a great dramatic effect that the layout of the hall lends itself to very well. A person can stand right in the center of the wonderful explosion of wood that is the Organ (see above photo) and look out onto the assembled audience, and they look rather commanding from up there. Well, they had the actress Holland Taylor go up there, splendidly dressed and dramatically lit, to read the parts of the Narrator. She has a quite commanding voice, and so it worked very well indeed.

Ok, I admit that I did have a silly moment when I could not help but distract myself a bit when I heard things like this:
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