This is a very important principle.

Properly used, in the dosages recommended, there are no reputable scientific studies that point to a cancer link with glyphosate. Not yet anyway! The single study (in over 40 years of studies) that suggests a link between the two has been accused of cherry-picking some data and avoiding contrary data. That’s why there is peer review of science, not courts of law to decide such things. The recent award of almost $290 million is a travesty, sorry as the case of the individal is.

Let’s be clear about this, I don’t condone the use of Roundup where expensive wines are produced, it is not just lazy, it is indecently money-grabbing when there are so many alternative manual approaches. But this particular molecule has benefited millions, if not billions of people and animals when it comes to the production of basic foodstuffs. Monsanto are an easy target, indeed they are a deserved target for some of their approaches, practices, and some other of their products, but a CEO of that company once described Glyphosate as ‘a gift from god,’ and, so-far, there is no credible evidence to the contrary…

Way back in 2010 I had a contact in Basel who did, and still does, some extra-ordinary work with his electron microscope. Dr Martin Oeggerli has been published worldwide by the BBC, National Geographic, Nature and so many others. See here: www.micronaut.ch

Having seen so a lot of his work with plants I asked if he would like to do the same with some pinot and chardonnay from Burgundy – we also collected some aligoté and gamay. I thought if the images were as great as I expected, then I could do a nice sideline, selling special fine-art prints of the images – they would have been expensive, but hey!

I recruited a certain David Clark, formerly of Morey St.Denis, to collect samples at flowering – and then passed on the phials to Martin in Basel.

As it turned out, for quite some time afterwards Martin was simply snowed-under with publishing work, then my own position became complicated after the company where I worked was acquired. I saw some interesting black and white images from Martin but colouration – and all such images that you see require many, many hours of colouration – was put on the back-burner and eventually forgotten – by me – but seemingly not Martin!

Today he sent me this great image – “Bill. Today, I finished a picture from a sample you originally provided back in 2010 (Chardonnay; enclosed)… hope you like it.” Now how cool is that?

We had a short conversation which I will include so that you may understand what you’re seeing:

Me: “Is that the tip from the flower, post fertilisation?”

Martin: “Exactly. To me, the stigma looks pretty fresh. I guess, it is showing the tip of the pistil (with the stigma in red) during, or just very shortly after fertilization. One pollen grain has hydrated and grows a pollen tube across the stigma. Since I am working on a project on plant tissue I was digging in the archive…”

Enjoy…

When even a (non-French) winemaker asks me what I mean by ‘agrumes’ in my tasting notes, then I realise that I’m using a ‘too Frenchie’ term in an Anglo-Saxon context, and I need to explain. I’ve added the following to my ‘Technical Glossary‘ page:

Agrumes
Agrume is the type of fruit that can range from orange to grapefruit – and everything in-between.* An agrume desert is normally a mix of orange, mandarin, grapefruit et-cetera. Agrume reduction or ‘noble reduction‘ (as is the current phrase-du-jour) is the Roulot style of white wine reduction that (everyone is trying to mimic today) has a grapefruit-style aromatic and even flavour, yet is (technically) closely associated with a modest reduction.
*Agrume fruits: Bergamot, Bigarade, Calamondin, Chedrat, Citrandarin, Citrange, Citrumelo, Clementine, Clemenvilla, Combava, Grapefruit, Kumquat, Lemon, Lime, Limette, Mandarin, Orange, Pomelo, Tangelo, Tangerine, Tangor, Ugli, Yuzu