Legal closure follows scientific closure on arsenic in wine
Reporting from California-based people who’ve been keeping eyes on this thing (W. Blake Gray at Wine-Searcher, Ben O’donnell at Wine Spectator) says that a California judge has dismissed the...
View ArticleSocial microbes and Schizosaccharomyces pombe
(First in a series on non-Saccharomyces yeast and microbes in company) If there’s been a theme to the wine microbiology research of the past few years, it’s been microbial communities. Don’t just...
View ArticleThe long, slow end (or, I finished my PhD today!)
I submitted my PhD today! Two and a half years and three days after I began, I carried four copies of my dissertation – all 96,866 words of it – to the University of Otago graduate school and walked...
View ArticleEffects of grapevine leafroll disease on wine quality (and when is a disease...
Gut reaction: Viruses cause disease. Disease is bad. Viruses are bad. Gut reaction muted by a lot of recent genetics research: Viral DNA seems to be embedded in genomes all over the place. We’re not...
View ArticleEndings and beginnings
Endings: of my PhD, of my research project on wine-industry science communication, of my time in New Zealand. Beginnings: of a research fellow position at the University of Edinburgh, of new work on...
View ArticleIndigenous yeast in Sauternes, multi-species family wineries, and Casale’s...
A group of French scientists, mostly based in Bordeaux, have recently published evidence* that the same Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations have lived at their winemaking homes in Sauternes for at...
View ArticleICCWS2016: The delightful, shameful state of the English wine industry
Last week’s International Cool Climate Wine Symposium (ICCWS2016) in the classic English sunny seaside town of Brighton occasioned an array of largely worthwhile technical presentations about which...
View ArticleThe “quality” of heavy bottles and cross-modal sensory perception (Social...
When Dr. Charles Spence stood up to speak at the International Cool Climate Wine Symposium in Brighton a week ago, I was looking forward to the reaction of the audience as much as to his presentation....
View ArticleArguing “microbial terroir” from microbe to metabolite
Short: New microbial terroir research provides even more evidence that local differences in yeast and bacteria associated with a vineyard make a difference to wine quality. Longer: Bokulich and Mills...
View ArticleIs hedgerow the same as sweaty passionfruit? (The social constructedness of...
The International Cool Climate Wine Symposium in Brighton was an excellent chance to sample English wines, and to discover that what New Zealander’s call “sweaty-passionfruit” seems to be what English...
View ArticleThe power of blending: On sherry, beer, and Brexit
Friday saw me thinking a lot about blending. I awoke to the seemingly impossible news that the UK (or, more precisely, English voters, as folks here in Edinburgh will be quick to point out) had voted...
View ArticleInnovation in sparkling wine production: Trust the yeast
Numerous recent studies have been playing with how yeast can work above and beyond the usual call of duty in sparkling wine production. The Australian Wine Research Institute’s (AWRI) superb yeast...
View ArticleNutrition labels for wine bottles: A good rationale, and a better one
Talking about nutrition labeling for wine is useful. But a new study (open-access article) assessing consumers’ interest in nutrition info on wine bottles limits its usefulness from the first sentence....
View ArticleThe objectivity of subjectivity in wine tasting and UC Davis’s first enology...
Dr. Steve Shapin is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and a distinguished senior scholar. He’s also an oenophile. Sometimes these things mix, especially when he’s talking about the...
View ArticleHuman intervention increases yeast biodiversity? Sort of.
A new article in PLOS ONE (which, being open-access, you can read for yourself) headlines with the promising title “Yeast Biodiversity in Vineyard Environments is Increased by Human Intervention.”...
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