Wine Sex, Beauty in the Bottle - LEARNING

Tasting Simplified

nospam@example.com (Sondra Barrett) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:31:13 -0700

Yesterday I enjoyed a wonderfully fun educational lunch with the "Swami of Umami" Tim Hanni.

Tim served up a variety of foods (steak, shrimp, asparagus, spaghetti squash) with and without magic seasonings. And I got first hand how we can basically drink any wine with any food, provided we know the remedies. A wine too tannic is softened if you add salt or a squeeze of lemon on the food. And we all know what happens if we have something sweet before sipping a dry wine - yuck, the wine becomes sharp and biting. Tim explains it this way - if you eat something sweet it diminishes any softness from coming out from the wine. The remedy, the salty sour trick.

The Robert Mondavi Winery also has these culinary tricks written up.

This sure makes me happy to be able to enjoy red wine with the whitest of foods, a no-no in the past.

And one last bit of taste education here - what is umami? Umami is the 5th taste of savory and comes from amino acids, especially glutamate, as seen here in MSG, also in nucleotides. The foods containing these constituents are meats, cheeses, soy sauce, mushrooms, anchovies, lots more.

Isn't it great to discover how to enjoy any wine with any food?

Tasting shapes? A Language of Wine

nospam@example.com (Sondra Barrett) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:53:55 -0700

How do you remember a wine? How do you describe your tasting experience? This wine is a Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

I am intrigued with the words people use to convey their impressions of a wine, and their memory. One expert talks about what their nose knows while another speaks to mouth sensations. I have limited vocabulary to talk about wine other than textural. That's probably why I continue to take pictures through the microscope. The images serve as a symbolic vocabulary that may someday be useful to all of us to remember wine.

It always surprises me how wine expresses itself in pictures and taste. I enjoy it without words and still would like a larger lexicon, any suggestions how to create wine language?

Some wine 'impressionistic art' on my website SondraBarrett.com Drink in the beauty.

TRANSFORMATION

nospam@example.com (Sondra Barrett) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:48:33 -0700

Only through grape's partnership with yeast, does the alchemical process called fermentation begin.

Yeast loves sugar in the sweet grape juice, chews it up and converts it into carbon dioxide and spirited alcohol. When alcohol levels reach about 15%, the yeast, 'too drunk' to work anymore, stop the process.

In wine's creation story, what is evident, yeast adds something essential to the mix of juice, acids, tannins and pigments. They not only transform the sugar into new mood-altering molecules, they bring more 'light' into the microscopic display.

This image of fermenting chardonnay reveals the tiny Montrachet yeast along with larger forms which are likely tartrates, the acid unique to the grape.

The hieroglyphics in the center are from an ancient wine jar seal, the earliest version of a wine label.

You could begin to see the wine designs uncovered with the microscope as glyphs or symbols of style. Or you might begin to think these are simply pretty pictures or that the person who took them had a wee bit more to drink than you have.

When we think of personal transformation it usually means a major spiritual change, so too with the grape.