How does oak aging change wine and whisky flavour, colour and texture? What do glass, gears, and automatons have to do with the invention of distillation? Why is yeast such an essential tool in scientific research and wine production, especially in the face of climate change?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm chatting with Adam Rogers, author of the New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze.

You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks

Giveaway

One of you is going to win a copy of his terrific new book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. To qualify, all you have to do is email me at natalie@nataliemaclean.com and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast. I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me. Good luck!

Highlights

What are some of the traits that new yeasts are being developed for?

Why does sugar deserve the title of most important molecule in the world?

How is human saliva used in the production of Chicha, one of the oldest types of alcoholic beverage?

What is microbial terroir and how does it affect the flavour profile of fermented drinks?

Why does Adam describe distillation as the apotheosis of human life on Earth?

How does the process of distillation work?

What is the most important thing we can learn from the alchemists?

Is the shape of a distillation still important to the process?

What's happening to spirits while they’re aging in barrels?

Have there been successful innovations to age wine and spirits more quickly?

Why do some people lose their sense of smell after a concussion?

Key Takeaways

When you're drinking whisky, and it's that beautiful amber color, that's all from the wood. It's completely clear when it goes into a barrel and it's brown when it comes out. So color is part of what changes, and all those flavours. In the process of aging, as the temperature goes up and down, the pores in the wood open and close. As they open, the liquid gets drawn into that layer inside of the wood, and then gets pushed back out. So there's this kind of back-and-forth process, which is why so many of the experimental attempts to accelerate the aging process use heat to try to cycle it faster.

Distillation was developed in the first two to 300 years of the Common Era. People were starting to transform naturally occurring phenomena into a technology that could exist in a temple or in the home. Distillation is one of those technologies, along with a lot of automatons and the simple machines, gears, screws and the steam engines.

Yeasts are a workhorse organism in laboratories because it’s very easy to change their traits and genetics. They share DNA with each other, and when they grow, they mutate very quickly. Generation to generation change. So you can use classic animal or microbial husbandry techniques to change them as well. This can become especially important as climate change changes the regions that are important to wine.

About Adam Rogers

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he writes about technology, culture, and the ways they overlap. Prior to joining BI, Adam was a longtime editor and writer at WIRED, where his article “The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress” was the second-most-read thing on the entire internet in 2015.

Adam’s WIRED feature story on a mysterious fungus that grows on whisky warehouses won a AAAS/Kavli science journalism award — and led to his 2014 New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. Adam is also the author of the 2021 book Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. He has also written for Alta, the Atlantic, National Geographic, the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian, and may be the only journalist to attend both San Diego Comic-Con and the White House Correspondents Dinner.

To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/331.

How does language about wine impact the way we experience and enjoy wine? How does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics? Why can yeast be described as a nano-technological machine?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm chatting with Adam Rogers, author of the New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze.

You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks

Giveaway

One of you is going to win a copy of his terrific new book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. To qualify, all you have to do is email me at natalie@nataliemaclean.com and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast. I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me. Good luck!

Highlights

What was Adam’s experience at a fancy restaurant in Chicago where food critic Jeffrey Steingarten was a fellow patron?

How did a New York restaurant experience expose Adam to the wild science of winemaking?

Why did Adam nearly have an existential moment while writing about the science of grapes?

How does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics?

Which moments did Adam want to capture in the book?

What were the most surprising insights Adam uncovered while writing Proof and what was the most difficult part of writing it?

Why does Adam describe yeast as a nano-technological machine?

Which facts about yeast did Adam find fascinating?

What have archaeologists discovered about the role of alcohol in early human civilization?

Which cultural approach to alcohol consumption did Adam find most interesting?

How do modern brewers and distillers safeguard their yeast?

Key Takeaways

Adam recounts the story of the couple sitting next to him ordering a dessert wine. The diner asked, “Is that a Vin du Glacier or a noble rot?” The two different ways to make a sweet wine. Just the fact that the diner was informed enough to know that there were these two methods would have a bearing on what he would be tasting. Here was this person operationalizing that interest to make his meal better. He wanted to have more fun.

If you're reporting on science, you have the scientists trying to understand something new or reinterpret understanding and then there are people who that's going to affect. With winemaking, you have practitioners who are often not themselves, scientists. So they are craftspeople in a stakeholder role too.

Louis Pasteur said I think there is an impossibly small, invisible, living creature that eats sugar and poops alcohol, and so the best chemists in the world at that time looked at that as a hypothesis and said, You're nuts. Nobody knew how inert chemicals could be alive. Nobody knew what the connection was. Those things are enzymes and understanding what enzymes do in a living body, that's what gave rise to biochemistry, and ultimately gave rise to biotechnology. That one insight.

About Adam Rogers

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he writes about technology, culture, and the ways they overlap. Prior to joining BI, Adam was a longtime editor and writer at WIRED, where his article “The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress” was the second-most-read thing on the entire internet in 2015.

Adam’s WIRED feature story on a mysterious fungus that grows on whisky warehouses won a AAAS/Kavli science journalism award — and led to his 2014 New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. Adam is also the author of the 2021 book Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. He has also written for Alta, the Atlantic, National Geographic, the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian, and may be the only journalist to attend both San Diego Comic-Con and the White House Correspondents Dinner.

To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/330.

What makes Sangiovese a difficult wine to grow and make? Why should you pay attention to the white wines of Tuscany? What do you need to know about Tuscany’s Vin Santo?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm chatting with Susan Keevil

You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks

Giveaway

Two of you are going to win a copy of her terrific book, On Tuscany: From Brunello to Bolgheri, Tales from the Heart of Italy. To qualify, all you have to do is email me at natalie@nataliemaclean.com and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast. I’ll choose two people randomly from those who contact me. Good luck!

Highlights

What are some common mistakes people make when comparing Tuscan wines to those from other regions?

What are Super Tuscans and how did they come to be?

Why did these rebel wines capture the imagination of the world in the 70s and 80s?

What’s the new Super Tuscan counter culture about?

Why did Brunello di Montalcino achieve icon status?

What makes Sangiovese difficult to grow and why doesn’t it tend to thrive in North America?

What motivated Susan to include sections on Tuscan white wines and Vin Santo in the book?

How is Vin Santo made and why is there so much variety?

What makes Tuscan olive oil so special?

How can you best pair Tuscan wines with food?

Why would Susan love to be able to share a bottle of wine with Queen Elizabeth II?

Key Takeaways

Susan notes that Sangiovese is like Pinot Noir in that it likes certain terroir, particular soils, the winds of Tuscany, and it is quite a sensitive grape. You can't overproduce it. It responds differently to different sites and it's not good in every vintage. It has so many parallels with Pinot Noir. They don't taste the same, but they behave the same.

Susan likes an underdog story like the white wines of Tuscany, because they're only like 10% of the wines produced, though she believes that the Trebbiano grape is like the evil twin. In the book, Emily O'Hare writes about grapes like Vernaccia, Vermentino and Ansonica that are producing some great wines so we should watch out for them. There's another lovely story about wines of the small island called Giglio. It was raided by the pirate Barbarossa, and he sent all the inhabitants away to be slaves in Constantinople. But he brought back people from a village in Greece, and they bought the grape called Ansonica with them and so those vines are still on the island today. Susan thinks white wines are going to be more important for Tuscany.

If you're going to find a comparison, Susan says that Tokaji is a really good one, because it has that bracing acidity that the Italians love as well. But also, you can't generalize with it. It's a 3,000 year-old-wine, and every farm makes a different version. In the past, they used to collect these grapes because they couldn't handle all the olives and all the grapes all at once. So they would leave some of the grapes in the drying lofts, up in the roofs. They would dry, and concentrate, and the sugars would get sweeter. When everything settled in November or March or February, they would make a wine from these beautiful sweet grapes. And they all have their own natural yeast from the air. And they would seed that yeast into the wine, ferment, and then they would lock it up in its barrel and leave it for seven to eight years. It would shrink, it would ferment. It would stop fermenting. And then at the end of that time, they would open the barrel very carefully, and it was something magnificent, but very, very different. Each producer would have their own.

About Susan Keevil

Susan Keevil is the Editorial Director of Académie du Vin Library, where she has played a pivotal role in establishing and nurturing this esteemed wine publishing house. A former editor of Decanter magazine, she has dedicated her career to the world of wine, from editorial leadership to in-depth exploration of the industry.

To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/329.