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dupes revisted…

By billn on November 08, 2006 #other sites

magnetic wine enhancerIt’s not so long ago that I mentionedJamie Goode’s (in)famous ‘discussion’ with the magnet guru, Dr Patrick Farrell MW. It now seems that the market for ‘wine enhancers’ is burgeoning – why pour a wine through a magnetic device when you can simply stand the bottle on a nice looking stand.
However, this important advance 😉 has now come across the desk of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) – seems they are offering $1,000,000 – what a lucky guy this Robert Catania is !!!

a new critic at large

By billn on November 01, 2006 #other sites

neal plus admirerIt is with great pleasure I hear today, that long time correspondent and occasional partner to lunches and bottle openings Neal Martin has finally sold-out. He is appointed (over Michel Bettane no less) to be the ‘critic at large’ for Robert Parker’s online empire.

I say sold-out, not because he is moving to eRP but because he will no-longer be providing ‘album (that’s CD for younger readers!!!) of the month’ for his readers – though in-truth it was becoming every second month of recent. It seems I will have to return to Baccarat and René & Renata without his youth perspective.

STOP PRESS – Neal Martin has officially not sold out – he confirms to me in writing that it’s not the end for this seminal work – my kipper ties can stay in the closet a little longer…

[EDIT1] – How it happenedPart 1
[EDIT2] – How it happenedPart 2

icon bashing

By billn on October 29, 2006 #other sites

It appears quite a strange hijack of a posting.

I suppose it’s his house, so RMP can say what he likes, but it seems as if he’s undermining his new staffer David Schildknecht even before he starts, who will now (possibly) have to review the 2002 wines of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti with one arm tied behind his back – it wouldn’t do to disagree with his new boss – or would it(?)!

PS I have no concerns about the wines I bought AFTER I tasted!

non-interventionist writing

By billn on October 17, 2006 #other sites#travel

Treat yourself to a dose of `non-interventionist´writing. An article that had me smirking on the tram to work; Eric Asimov with his tongue only slightly in-cheek. Here is a great follow-up post – really absorbing, insightful writing – and reading!

Heading to Dutch Siberia (Friesland) today and not back until late Friday – so it will mainly be offline stuff for a few days…

dupes

By billn on September 29, 2006 #other sites

rare beaujolais!Value, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

That said, I expect the market for vintage Beaujolais is rather limited – just one guy/gal in Ohio it seems – at least when he/she wants $1,200 for said bottles.

They say that there’s one born every minute (mug that is), I expect our person in Ohio will have to trawl very wide to find them!

Clos Goillotte…

By billn on August 24, 2006 #other sites

the clos goillotte

Hard to find this wine as it’s such a small (monopole) vineyard in Vosne-Romanee – it’s attached to the old hunting lodge of the Dukes of Burgundy and at 0.55 hectares, barely big enough to have been their kitchen garden, but Dave Brookes has managed to get hold of a bottle! – Looks (overly) pricy, but it is a ’99 I suppose, and it did sound rather nice…
Cheers

jamie goode’s new-found friend

By billn on August 23, 2006 #other sites

Our German cousins call it schadenfreude, basically it means taking a little enjoyment out of someone-else’s misfortune. The word sprang to mind when I read the post on Jamie’s blog. I’m frankly amazed that: a)this Master of Wine has no idea of the CV of his target, and b)that he would choose such uninformed rudeness (I can’t think of an alternative word – though perhaps arrogance could be substituted) for a public forum. Clearly Jamie was scathing about the scientific basis of this ‘gadget’ – but let’s be honest, there is none – but he was not rude. Perhaps Jamie should invite a few ‘more senior’ MW’s to roadtest the gadget vs other ‘aeration’ devices, as this seems to be the mode of action – assuming there is one.
My smile widened when the errant MW mentioned that he had tested the device ‘several’ times – ah, at last, some scientific rigour!
Cheers

Melatonin: a grape excuse to hit the bottle

By billn on July 12, 2006 #a bit of science#other sites

Back from a short break. Gratified to see that the site made a new record last week when the summer issue was launched: 743 unique IP addresses in one day – wow – that’s 200 up on the last record!

Just in case you need more excuse to drink here’s an article I picked up last week from Chemistry in Industry:

Melatonin: a grape excuse to hit the bottle

by Marina Murphy

There is now yet another reason to drink more wine. Scientists in Italy say they have discovered that grape varieties used to make some of the most popular red wines contain melatonin, the ‘sleep hormone’ previously thought to be produced only by mammals.

Melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxy-tryptamine) is produced in the pineal gland, a pea-like organ located in the brain that is sensitive to light. When light hits the eye, production of melatonin ceases. Besides aiding sleep, melatonin is thought to influence annual rhythms and seasonal changes in animals.

Researcher Iriti Marcello of the University of Milan believes: ‘the melatonin content in wine could help regulate the circadium rhythm [sleep-wake patterns], such as the melatonin produced by the pineal gland in mammals’. This, he said, may well explain why so many of us reach for the bottle to help us wind down after a long day.

Iriti’s group measured melatonin content in the skins of eight Vitis vinifera cultivars (grape varieties): Barbera, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Croatina, Nebbiolo, Merlot, Marzemino and Sangiovese. Concentration varied greatly among the cultivars with the highest levels of melatonin found in Nebbiolo, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sangiovese and Croatina (Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, doi:10.1002/jsfa.2537). Nebbiolo contained the highest melatonin levels at around 400pg/ml.

But Richard Wurtman, of the department of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is sceptical. ‘Many investigators have tried and failed in the past to find melatonin in a number of foods,’ he said. Wurtman is not convinced that what the researchers are calling ‘melatonin’ is melatonin — ‘just something with some fairly similar high-pressure liquid chromatography parameters and some immune cross-reactivity (by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay). More appropriate studies should use gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,’ he said.

Itisi’s group say that the concentration of melatonin in grapes can be increased using benzothiadiazole, a chemical that increases disease resistance in plants (a plant ‘vaccine’).

Melatonin levels in human blood range from 20pg/ml in the morning to 55pg/ml at night.

Burgundy Report

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