Mosel 101

For anyone interested in Riesling and Wine Science, Lars Carlberg, who exports fantastic Rieslings under the Mosel Wine Merchant Imprint, has generously provided a graduate seminar entitled: "On Aromatics: Wild Ferment, Sulfur and Slate" at the Brooklynguy College of Wine.

Lab Employees will receive 10 (ten) Continuing Education Credits for attending.

Faraway Labs

DATELINE: Perth, WA. Intrepid wine drinker, ace photographer and real and actual doctor, Dr Edward Winosapian, has embarked upon a titillating experiment at his Western Australian headquarters (link).

At the Lab today, we are marveling at his patience and wish him godspeed.

By the way, Doc... This is the image, we would have used:



( © Vladimir Vlasov | Dreamstime.com )

Everyone Has Baggage

Early in my oenological career, I had the good fortune to tour the Margaret River wine region in Western Australia. Taking advantage of a strong US dollar, I shipped home several cases of great discoveries. The amiable fellow who handled the shipping told me to make sure I let the bottles sit for at least a few weeks upon receipt. The constant vibration of an airplane in flight disturbs the wine, he told me. You need to let them settle down.

This was my first encounter with the horrors of bottle shock.

It's a standard practice to let new inventory received at the Lab "rest" for 6-8 weeks.

But is this really necessary? Do we really need to let our bottles sit there for all that time?

We thought it would be interesting to run some tests.

First test up next.


(suitcase: © Gino Crescoli | Dreamstime.com )

Don't go into the light, Carol Anne

If you're up to date in your Lab Reports, you'll know that we have been bombarding a bottle of Pacific Rim Dry Riesling with Ultraviolet radiation in hopes of recreating the "lightstrike" wine fault under laboratory conditions (the original FINDING FAULT Lab post is here).

We subjected the bottle to 10-12 hours of UV-light each day over a six day period.

Now there's an argument to be made that we'd have been better off irradiating our wine in a tanning bed. As it may be that radiation in the UVA/B spectrum is more effective in this regard.

But we're a scientific lab, not a tanning salon. So we went with what we had, namely, a SterilGARD III ADVANCE class II Biological Safety Cabinet.

Lightstrike occurs through a reductive process which creates a number of sulfuric compounds, among them something called thiols. Thiols are the same chemical component used to give natural gas it's rank smell. They make old beer taste skunky. They actually make actual skunks smell skunky. Trying to get them into your wine is clearly ill-advised.

So we held our noses (figuratively; wouldn't be much of a test if we'd actually held our noses) and blindly tasted our thiol-thick wine against one not similarly abused.

It wasn't easy to tell the good from the bad. The wine from the sterilization tank had a strong odor of rubber bands, and a burnt rubber taste apparent on the palate as well.

When not abused the Pacific Rim Riesling is a competent, if somewhat boring, expression of the grape. (I believe we already mentioned it's a "great value"). A nose of mandarin orange and citrus zest with hints of honey and straw. A straightforward palate of pear (sweet) and lime (acid).

Someone did note the irony that the goût de lumière was slightly phenolic. And so could almost pass as goût de pétrole in a Riesling. We've asked the Baker company to alert us if they have an upswing of sales of SterilGARD cabinets in the Mosel river valley.

Goût de lumière

The "taste of light." Sounds sexy doesn't it? Like a gift from the fairies. Or a something you eat on the way to Nirvana. But goût de lumière -- lightstrike in English -- is actually a fault that makes tainted wine taste like rancid rubber bands or damp sheep.

Amongst the flaws in our FINDING FAULT series, we voted LIGHTSTRIKE as the flaw with the best name (see THIS NOTE on voting at the Lab).

According to wikipedia:

Lightstruck wines are those that have had excessive exposure to ultraviolet light... Very delicate wines, such as Champagnes, are generally worst affected, with the fault causing a wet cardboard or wet wool type flavor and aroma... The fault explains why wines are generally bottled in colored glass, which blocks the ultraviolet light, and why wine should be stored in dark environments.

Good to know why wine bottles are green. But what does lightstrike really taste like?

At the Lab, we are determined to find out. So we jammed a bottle of Pacific Rim, NV, Dry Riesling into a SterilGARD III ADVANCE class II Biological Safety Cabinet (manufactured by the Baker Company) that we use to sterilize instruments. We plan to bombard the bottle with a massive dose of ultraviolet radiation (254nm/UVC), and then taste it blind against a bottle stored carefully in our cellar.

No doubt, several questions come quickly to mind. First of which must surely be: Who makes non-vintage Riesling?

Randall Grahm is who. Grahm is the eccentric genius of Bonny Doon Vineyard. He has scaled back his business significantly to focus on the production of single-vineyard wines driven by our old friend the magic mud. Which means this non-vintage Riesling is a vineyard by-product. Whether or not this is left-over juice is pure speculation on my part, but I do know that this wine is made from grapes grown in Washington state and then blended with additional wine sourced from the Mosel region in Germany. You can buy it at Trader Joe's for $9.

What? It's not like we were going to irradiate something expensive.

You won't want to miss the results. Stay tuned...



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C6H12O6 → 2 CH3CH2OH + 2 CO2

A Lab correspondent recently wrote to us about his own experiments with vacuum pumps. And given our own work on the topic, I thought it would be useful to share his results. He pointed out that pumping per the manufacturers' recommendations (either until the pump returns strong resistance or starts to "click") might, in fact, be doing harm to your wine. Aggressive pumping will certainly provide a better vacuum and so reduce the effects of oxidation, but it may also serve to help pull ethanol out of solution and make the preserved wine smell "hot."

If you want to understand the hard parts of the science read these:

On the miscibility of Ethanol and Water (Science Beat); Wikipedia on Ethanol; and more on the effects of pressure on the solubility of gas.

If you read them (and I know you didn't), you know that yeast eats sugar and produces ethanol. It's the basis for making both wine and bio-fuels. Ethanol and water mix well but with weird results. Most relevant is probably that ethanol reduces surface tension in water. I say probably because I'm way over my head here science-wise and making most of this up. But it has something to do with the hydrogen's bonding properties and the reduction of system entropy that results. So it's not so much the pumping that's the problem, but the eventual release of pressure and the resulting disequilibrium that causes ethanol to evaporate out of solution and make the wine smell like grape-y diesel fumes. It's not dissimilar to what happens when you open a Coke and the gas, previously under pressure, escapes.

So we've been pumping less vigorously at the Lab (I know what you're thinking. Seriously, what's the matter with you? That is so infantile...) and the results have been positive (that's what she said!).

By the way, the guy who wrote us about this also makes a no smell, no taste, no residue soap just for wine glasses. We use it at the Lab. Check it out if you want.

Gas Versus No Gas

For this experiment, we uncorked and tasted two bottles of Bodegas Olivares, Altos de la Hoya, Jumilla Monastrell, 2006, detecting no discernible difference between the two wines (see yesterday's tasting notes).

We poured off exactly 300 ml from each bottle. We sealed one with Private Preserve. The other we reclosed with a Vacuvin pump. Then we waited 72 hours before re-tasting the wines.

The idea behind both approaches is the same. Get rid of the oxygen. Either pump it out, or replace it with a heavier-than-air mix of oxygen-less gas. According to the Private Preserve website, their special blend is "pure air with no oxygen," a semantically challenged definition to be sure.

The wine preserved with inert gas had a beautiful nose, with no discernible fade. The pumped bottle, however, had slipped a little. There was also a warm-alcohol volatility present (even though both were poured after 10 minutes in the fridge). The pumped bottle was drinking well, no fade noted in the fruit. But the chalky, mineral finish had gone slightly bitter (no doubt from oxidation). On the palate, the gassed bottle was better again. There was a noticeable freshness to the fruit, especially when tasted side by side against the pump. The finish wasn't bitter, but -- and I'm not sure why -- the tannins seemed a little sharper, more pronouncedly green than both the prior tasting and the pumped bottle.

Neither device "failed" per se. The inert gas certainly seemed to outperform the pump in this trial, but the pumped bottle was still very drinkable, with only a slight fade in aroma and taste.

It is perhaps worth noting that the Lab has consistently argued the best approach to the dilemma of wine preservation is to avoid it altogether. If you drink the whole bottle, there's nothing to preserve.

The Day After

Summer is over and we are back to the grind of full-time science at the Lab.

At a recent planning meeting, several storage issues made it on our agenda. Most noteworthy were several proposed experiments with a focus on storing wine after it has been opened. We plan to test effectiveness of air pumps and inert gas. We also want to see what effect, if any, storage temperature has on already opened bottle of wine.

For our first round of tests, we found a few bottles of 2006 Bodegas Olivares, Altos de la Hoya, Jumilla Monastrell (Mourvedre).

The sandy soils of Jumilla proved inhospitable to our old foe, the Dry Leaf Devastator, and many of the vineyards survived the Phylloxera plague unscathed. So the region is home to some of the oldest, ungrafted vines in the world. The Altos de la Hoya comes from grapes grown in an 11 hectare vineyard with some vines planted as far back as 1872. The importers claim that the 2006 vintage in Jumilla was the best in a decade.

Ungrafted, old Mourvedre from a great vintage. It's astonishing that you can buy this wine for less than $10. It will make you rethink your first growth Bordeaux collection.

Aromas of sweet, smokey plums with background notes of dusty cobblestones and Wrigley's spearmint chewing gum emerge with some time in the glass. On the palate, more plum and rich, ripe figs with hints of campfire and bacon. Underlying this is an amazing core of sweet, chalky minerality. Given their youth, the tannins are surprisingly soft and chewy.

This deep purple-y garnet wine has the lively tension and balanced integration often found in wines made from own-rooted vines (this is also on the Lab's agenda).

We opened a couple over the weekend to test. Results later this week.


(image: © Carlos Sanchez Pereyra | Dreamstime.com)