balex
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Posts posted by balex
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But your use of the word "limited" hits the nail on the head here. The Tmes lists one article, but it has a word count of 409 (the articles I remember were significantly longer, often multiple coverage with sidebars, etc. in the same paper) and it's from a weekday (20 Nov. 1991) and two of us who were there remember gathering the Sunday papers and comparing (marveling at) the extensive coverage. In any event, we can't get a copy of even that short article here through any library, try as we do. And none of the other London papers has archive indexes that go back to 1991.
That's why I posted my question here - in the hopes that somebody might remember this study and be able to help. Egullet was the last place I expected to have somebody come on and post an insulting reply like yours!
I guess I should have sprinkled some more emoticons through my post above. No offense was intended. I am not mourning the loss of libraries -- I hate them, they are slow and annoying and it is difficult to find what you want, and the British Library where I spend some of my time is over an hour away -- I use the internet as much as possible but unfortunately a lot of information has not yet been transferred to digital form and occasionally they are indispensable.
At least once a week I have to haul myself into some library or other and frankly it's a pain.
Now to show that I am not a complete asshole I shall try to be helpful. There is a recent article on the issue in Nature 414, 863 - 864 (2001) by Corder et al. snappily entitled "Endothelin-1 synthesis reduced by red wine". I suggest you find a copy of this, electronically
, and trace the references back, and then forwards using a citation index.The study you are thinking of is perhaps the one described here
"Wine, alcohol, platelets, and the French paradox for coronary heart disease."
Lancet. 1992 Jun 20;339(8808):1523-6.
Renaud S, de Lorgeril M.
Abstract available here
Cyril Renaud is a chef, not a scientist I think? The scientist one is Serge Renaud.
If you google for Renaud French Paradox you get a lot.
This doesn't help with your specific request about the Sunday Times, but the Sunday Times rates only slightly above the Weekly World news as far as reliability goes.
And I do confess I did not go to a library to find this stuff out.
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You could always go to a ... library. (Gasp). This is a sort of primitive pre-Internet information storage device with limited search facilities.
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Nice to find another casalino fan!
I haven't ever seen them in England -- San Marzano ones make it over to a few specialists here, but never casalino. I have a feeling that they wouldn't ripen properly here.
Actually that's not quite true -- my carry-on on the flight home was 3 kilos, and we had delicious pasta for about a week afterwards, which dulled the pain of leaving Rome.
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Sometimes fish and seafood is stored for a long time in an inert gas (nitrogen I guess) that reduces the rate of decomposition a lot, but probably doesn't slow down the deterioration of flavour. Or perhaps they were just grievously overcooked.
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I just went to Rules for the first time, and it was fine but Wilton's is very much better --but a fair bit more expensive of course. The people watching is great at Wilton's too -- you can learn a lot about traditional English tailoring by having dinner there.
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I am not sure what your point is about window-dressing?
Window dressing is what is used to get you to enter the store. Once you're inside, they can get down to the business of selling you what is most profitable. If you were to measure the shelf space given to various products, it would show you that their biggest profits lie in mediocrity.
I disagree with this argument -- the market for cheap stuff is highly competitive since it forms the basis for "shopping baskets" comparison. Margins are very much higher on the premium foods, and the supermarkets have a strong incentive to convince people to purchase that.
Though, of course since the volume is very much larger on the cheap stuff, as you point out, the gross profit on the generic baked beans and so on is undoubtedly higher.
You are right that this is off-topic, perhaps we could start another thread if you want to continue.
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Big supermarkets have enough space to cater to several different market segments -- indeed they probably aspire to cover pretty much the whole specturm of food retailing. It's the small ones which really suck.
I am not sure what your point is about window-dressing? You are right that this constitutes a small percentage of their overall sales, but I understand that it is profitable in its own right.
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again, i emphasize its mostly the attitude towards food which has allowed big capitalistic supermarkets and hospitality companies to impact the way the british eat.
I think until quite recently supermarkets like Sainsbury's were considered to be forces for good in the sense of introducing a variety of new and exciting treats to the mainstream English consumer -- for example, olive oil Certainly if you read Elizabeth David and she explains how there is a shop or two in Soho where you can find this exotic ingredient, you realise how far we have come.
You are right that it is the attitude to food that is the key factor -- the liberal consensus that it is all the fault of the big bad supermarkets seems to me to have it backwards.
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I'd agree with that, but every once in a while you like a particular sort of wine and you want to try a particularly fine example. I mean if you like Merlot based wines, then sooner or later you are going to want to try a top Merlot wine, just to see what that it is capable of. Out of curiosity. And that, whether it is Petrus or Masseto is going to cost you at least $100. At least that's what happens to me.
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We spent a week in Rome; staying in a flat near Campo de' Fiori. The flat was great because we could buy vegetables at the market, and some wine, and then eat at home in the evening.
I was a bit worried about the season (too late for truffles, and too early for peas), but in fact they had both of my favourite sort of tomatoes in the market, and lots of carciofi and different sorts of greens.
And puntarelli with the anchovy sauce. I was happy.
In no particular order:
Ice cream: we were quite near Alberto Pica, just by via Arenula. He is justly famous for
his rice and cinnamon, but his ricotta and caremalized figs falvaour is damn fine too.
Coffee: I have gone off St Eustachio as it is adulterated. Best cup was in the Gran Caffe La Caffettiera in Piazza di Petra which was two teaspoons of heaven. But pretty much everywhere does excellent coffee.
Pasta: Immodestly I will say I cooked it myself. It was with some perfect casalino tomatoes which are very red, soft, deeply grooved tomatoes with very thin skins, that have an exceptionally intense flavour best with parsley not basil. I was amazed to find them in February.
Bread: pizza bianca from the forno in Campo de' Fiori itself is so good. We were eating about a square foot each at least twice a day. You get some of that , some greenish tomatoes from Pachino,
a few slices of ham, and you are going to eat as well as anywhere on the planet.
Overall meal: we didn't go to anyplace very fancy. The best meal was at Da Nino, near the Spanish steps. I have in the past been slightly disappointed with the food here which is fairly standard Tuscan food. They have their own farm which they get their oil and some other stuff from.
I had -- carciofo Romano -- this is not the deep fried one, but the one which is cooked slowly.. Perfect intense flavour. Some tortellini and then some calf's liver veneziana -- everything was flawless. Only slight disappointed was the wine - Camartina by Querciabella which was slightly underwhelming.
Best wine was a Prunotto Barbera Casiamoli 97 at Girarrosto Fiorentina in via Sicilia with a vast and perfectly cooked steak.
Prettiest waitress: at Ditirambo which also has an exceptionally good wine list, but the food is a bit weak.
Best pizza: I always go to the same place and it is always perfect: La Sacrestia in Via del Seminario. This is Roman style so paper thin. Wood burning oven, home made sauce. Mmmmm.
Best wine shop:
Our flat was just near this newish place called Roscioli, which had lots of great wines, but the shop was a bit warm, and I ddin't really trust the storage conditions. I got a bottle of Dal forno Romano from Bleve in the ghetto, which has a good choice, and people that know what they are on about. They are a bit grumpy though.
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What I meant about sensory similarity was more about things like 'masking' where the presence of one chemical reduces the sensory importance of another. TCA is an example. Now if we are not measuring the presence of both of these chemicals we are completely screwed. Even if both of these are in our low dimensional subspace, this still induces non-linearities. In particular since I think exact matching is not feasible, we want to find the point in the convex hull of the mixers that is closest to the target. IF we have some wierd function that measures sesnory distance, then the sets of points equidistant from the target wine will not be hyperspheres -- indeed might not even form convex stes -- in which case the whole problem ceases to be convex and you have multiple local optima and probably need to use some stochastic optimisation to find the best solution , and that's assuming we have good model of the distance function.
And the number of chemicals in a mature wine is probabky really large. TCA can be detected by humans at concentrations of a few parts per trillion. So in principle we could be talking about a billion to a trillion different chemicals.
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Of course wine making is awash in chemical reactions, and aging involves chemical reactions. But blending is not supposed to be as active as pouring vinegar over baking soda!
Blending in wine making has been around for a long time. If the process of blending was wildly nonlinear (blending and aging not commutative), easy to believe that the intuitive techniques would just have become lost. Instead, likely a good first-cut approximation is that for reasonably stable 'wine', blending is 'linear' or close enough for the approximations being attempted.
But, maybe I'm wrong: Maybe the extra tannins in one wine will affect the esters in another.
I do agree that there are likely many open questions in blending wines to approximate the flavor of another wine.
Basically I agree with you -- but in my experience with wine the more I know, the more I know I don't know.
In particular I think there are a number of assumptions that are problematic.
First there is the assumption that it is only a few (100) chemicals that are important. Secondly what we are intersted in is not chemical similarity but sensory similarity -- and it is not clear that unscaled Euclidean distance to the target wine is the right metric. Thirdly there is the issue of chemical stability that you touch on.
I think people have really no clue about exactly what goes on chemically in a bottle of wine over fifty years. The holy grail is to type "Chateau Cheval Blanc 1947 as it was in 1985" into your InstaWine box and have it dispense a glass. But it is a long way to that point.
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Okay, let's see:
Suppose we are given a bottle of Chateau Effete Rotchild and a list of 300 other roughly similar wines and asked to blend the 300 wines to be like the Chateau Effete Rotchild. Suppose we measure the concentration of 100 relevant chemicals in each of the 301 wines. Suppose we are given prices per bottle for each of the 300 wines we are to use for blending.
Now, can we blend the 300 wines to match the Chateau Effete Rotchild on the 100 chemicals?
If so, then how do we do this at least total cost?
Hmm ....
It turns out, this problem has been investigated for about 55 years. The problem is now very thoroughly understood. The results are in the form of powerful theorems, elegant proofs, refined algorithms, very high quality software, etc.
Turns out, for this problem, the solution would be a piece of cake!
One result: If we can do the blending at all, then we can do it at least cost for no more than 100 blending wines -- we won't need the other 200.
How 'bout that!
Not at all.
You are only allowed a convex combination of the wines that you are mixing and there is no guarantee that your fancy wine is going to be in the convex hull of your cheap blending wines.
In any event, ctgm's point is valid: wines are not static linear combinations of chemicals but complex dynamical systems with interesting non-linearities in the ester reactions etc.
Still an open problem, IMHO.
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Balex,
you are right in that Tradizionale fermentation works a little bit differnet. Acetic fermentation starts from (fruit) wine, whereas balsamic fermentation starts from concentrated must (reduced to ~1/2 - 1/3 by slow boiling). Balsamico fermentation is a simultaneous alcoholic and acidic fermentation. The sugar concentration is so high that the osmophilic yeasts are not able to ferment it in one go so that the acetobacter can convert alcohol into acetic acid as it is formed. Alcohol builds up to up to 5% and then starts to decline again. In the finished product, there is almost no alcohol left. Because of the complex bacteria/yeast coculture and the effect of climate, Tradizionale can vary dramatically in composition. Some of them do not reach 4% acid and that's where the italian law wants to see them labelled as Condimento rather than aceto. That's where you might have picked up that Tradizionale is not a vinegar, which is not true, of course.
I think this is why tradizionale is so wine friendly -- it has such a low percentage of acetic acid.Because the dry extract (a decent wine will have 25 g/l, to say a ballpark number) can go up to 900 g/l (1 l of water weighs 1000 g ...) you don't taste the acidity as much, but be assured it is there. Acidity varies between 4 and 8%, quite the same region that fruit, wine and sherry vinegars cover.
Normal Balsamic vinegar is a mixture of wine vinegar and the 'pure' tradizionale.That is simply not true. Normal, i.e. industrial balsamic vinegar is a mixture of acetic acid, oak extract, cooked grape juice and caramelized sugar. That's why it costs $2.99 at TraderJoes. If you are lucky, you may come across artisanal balsamico that was produced in a similar but abbreviated process. Or vinegar destined to be tradizionale that didn't make it. I that I think nobody in their right mind would blend pure tradizionale (that is by definition only stuff that has been approved) with wine vinegar. I think that in Modena this would be considered heresy. No kidding there...
Thanks for your comments -- that was exactly what I wanted to know.
You are right that most stuff that says balsamic vinegar on the bottle has absolutely nothing to do with anything we are talking about here. But I have some that I bought from the same place that I bought my tradizionale stuff, and they said that it was a mixture of the must-based balsamic , thinned out with normal vinegar -- (and probably some other stuff). It was expensive enough for that to be plausible.
I went to look at the bottle just now but it doesn't explain. I am sure you are right that it doesn't go through the same certification process that the tradizionale stuff does.
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Chateauneuf du Pape : clos de l'oratoire des papes 2000.
This is a really nice wine: excellent balance, nice flavours, not too concentrated.
. I got 6 bottles of this for Xmas, and my wife especially liked it so I got some more. From Majestic.
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The girlfriend of one of my buddies posed this question to me.
"How can you not like merlot if you’re such a wine lover?"
The same reason why I can be a wine lover and despise Chardonnay!
Everyone's tastes are different, that's why!
It is okay to not like a particular wine... The same goes (I suppose) for soda lovers - "how can you like Pepsi, but not Coke?" To me, they are the same but the analogy works.
Do you mean you dislike all wines made wih Chardonnay? Or just that stuff that says Chardonnay on the bottle?
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Well, Scott, we will have to agree to disagree about some specific wines -- perhaps our tastes are very different.
I particular agree about 'independent recommendations'. Some wine merchants really exaggerate the quality of the wines (Berry Bros. are particular offenders, IMO).
The real question is : I need (hah!) some good claret for current drinking. At £20-40 what can you get?
You can get good chateau in an off year or lesser chateau from a better year. Now few of the 99 s are ready yet so I guess you can still pick up some lesser 95s which might be just about there. I have quite a lot of 89s already, 90s are mostly too expensive. What am I leaving out? 91- 94? I don't think so.
98s not ready yet mostly. Cru Bourgeois from 2000? Not drink claret for a bit?
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Well, I obviously don't think they are rubbish, otherwise I wouldn't have bought them.
It's clearly not a top vintage but they are drinking well now -- Cos is delicious at the moment, some Pomerol are good etc.
I think it has suffered by comparison with surrounding years (95, 96 and 2000) , and as you say merchants have had some trouble selling. IMO, good values for people that aren't obsessed with ratings.
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This is a huge fashion in Italy and often is done almost everywhere - even in wine bars. The equally huge fashion for gigantic wine glasses means that a big chunk of your bottle can disappear just to rinse out the glasses. I think Italy has exported this overdone exercise to the USA now. Frankly I think they can get the glasses clean without wasting your wine.
But you can prime lots of glasses with only one splash of wine. You pour it from one into the next and so on.
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I rather extravagantly bought a case of '97 Leoville Lascases from Farr vintners for 450 a case which I thought was a good deal and then a couple of dayas later in Oddbins Fine Wine saw the same wine at the reduced case price of 959. Everywine has it listed at various prices up to 1367 a case. Nickollls and Perks has it for 790 in bond. Basically prices are all over the place.
I was very surprised because I thought that for a very mainstream wine like this you would have a liquid market (
) but it appears not. -
I think the thing to remember about the tradizionale is that it is not really a vinegar at all. My definition of vinegar is a process that goes from grapes via fermentation to something alcoholic (i.e. a proto wine) and then the alcohol turns to acetic acid. Tradizionale short circuits this process as bit. Normal Balsamic vinegar is a mixture of wine vinegar and the 'pure' tradizionale.
I think this is why tradizionale is so wine friendly -- it has such a low percentage of acetic acid.
Does anyone know how the process works? When does the fermentation take place? Does the stuff in the casks actually have alcohol in?
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In the UK it is quite rare to have to wait for a reserved table to be free. But maybe that is just because I don't go to places like the Ivy.
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Fortnum and Masons will ship anywhere.
Some countries have customs regulations that make it difficult to receive foodstuffs without hassle.
Help from Londoners, please
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
Fascinating indeed as others have pointed out -- but very bad news for those of us who have been relying on this as a justification for massive consumption of red wine.