but the second part is *tres amusant*.
For your further edification I have appended the CHE article, very difficult to obtain, referenced therein.
clark
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Natural pesticides in wine keep fruit healthy
By Stephen Meuse, Globe Correspondent, 3/26/2003
The mysterious ''French Paradox'' was first described, not in French,
but in English -- in the pages of a prestigious British medical
journal. It was the summer of 1992, and a pair of French pathologists
had uncovered a provocative statistical anomaly: While a high intake
of saturated fat was linked to high mortality from coronary heart
disease in most countries, in France it was just the opposite. There,
high intakes of saturated fat were correlated with low heart disease mortality.
The authors guessed that because the French drink a lot of red wine,
the wine might be acting as a prophylactic against cardiovascular
disease. They weren't sure how, though. As a result of the statistics,
research into the health benefits of wine-drinking surged, and US red wine sales shot up.
Now a quartet of Spanish researchers have shown that resveratrol
-- the polyphenol abundant in red wine that is believed to play
a key role in delaying the onset of coronary heart disease -- is
also effective in preventing post-harvest rot in grapes and other fruits.
Resveratrol belongs to a group of compounds known as stilbenes,
which are spontaneously synthesized on the surface of grapes as
an immune response to attack by fungal diseases. Stilbenes, in other
words, are natural pesticides and resveratrol (a powerful antioxidant)
is among the first to mobilize against a fungus offensive.
The researchers wanted to know if dousing table grapes and other
fruits with a solution of commercially available resveratrol and
water might help inhibit molds and keep them fresh, post-harvest,
for extended periods. In last January's issue of the Journal of
Agriculture and Food Chemistry, the team reports that the technique worked like a charm.
Apples treated with the resveratrol wash stayed in perfect condition
for 75 days at room temperature, remaining firm, juicy, and flavorful.
Untreated fruit succumbed to complete disintegration over the same period.
The new technique may offer a welcome alternative to genetic modification
as a means of extending the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
No word yet on whether resveratrol baths will soon replace botox
injections. But in Los Angeles they're watching this carefully.
Curbing winespeak
For decades now, an English professor in the Midwest has nourished
a fascination with wine critics and their often feckless efforts
to translate sensory impressions into words. Now Sean Shesgreen,
professor of English at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb,
Ill., has gone public with his ruminations. His article, ''Wet Dogs
and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for a New Millennium,'' published
in the March 7 ''Chronicle of Higher Education,'' is causing a bemused stir.
Shesgreen claims to have observed a clear evolution in the discourse
of wine over the last 100 years or so, beginning with the late Victorian
British critic and wine connoisseur George Saintsbury, who used,
among other methods, a classification of wines on the basis of gender.
For example, he described the wines of Hermitage as ''manly,'' while
those of Chambolle-Musigny he termed ''delicate and feminine, with beguiling grace . . .''
The professor thinks that when wines are described as having breed,
style, and finesse, an obsession with class betrays itself. Yet
this was the trademark of American specialty importer Frank Schoonmaker.
Schoonmaker's 1950s stories in The New Yorker constituted a model
of good form for a generation of wine criticism, says Shesgreen.
By the mid-1970s, wine discourse had shifted to something more like
its current form, what Shesgreen calls the ''fruits and vegetables''
stage. He links this era with baby-boomer nostalgia for the pastoral
and idyllic. He thinks it might also stem from the publication in
1976 of ''Wines -- Their Sensory Evaluation'' by Maynard A. Amerine
and Edward B. Roessler, an oenologist and a mathematician, respectively,
at the University of California at Davis.
Their goal, in part, was to give the undressed vine of wine rhetoric
a proper pruning, eliminating merely evocative terms such as ''elegant''
and ''lithe'' in favor of a limited, controlled vocabulary that
focused on specific, identifiable flavors and aromas.
It's a little hard to tell where the author stands with respect
to all this, except that he reserves a special place for Robert
M. Parker Jr., the enormously influential wine critic whose penchant
for mixed metaphors and malapropisms are, he fears, debasing the genre in unprecedented ways.
On the phone from his university office, Shesgreen confessed to
being ''increasingly irritated'' by Parker's deployment of urban
and industrial terminology in his publication, ''The Wine Advocate,''
where, he says, wines have been described as being ''like a skyscraper
in the mouth'' or like ''a runaway locomotive.''
As a writer, we found Shesgreen unpretentious but decidedly pungent,
with an incisively wry edge and hints of fresh-cut irony.
Stephen Meuse can be reached at onwine@attbi.com.
This story ran on page B3 of the Boston Globe on 3/26/2003.
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From the issue dated 3/7/2003
Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for a New Millennium
By SEAN SHESGREEN
As a habitual wine drinker and a former wine columnist, I
regularly slog through articles and books filled with the
fanciful, extravagant, mystifying babble used by writers whose
prose is deeply disconnected from the beverage they pretend to
describe.
One such writer, ransacking nature for imagery to promote a
French wine, paints a regional Burgundy as "a good mountain
stream that could one day become a long, peaceful river." The
celebrated Robert Parker, turning to the city for similes and
metaphors, describes a 2000 Bordeaux as "a towering skyscraper
in the mouth without being heavy or disjoined." Other writers
regard wines as if they were mental patients with
psychopathologies: Spain's Ribera del Duero from Bodegas Reyes
has been called "more brooding than cheerful." A small dose of
such criticism is enough to make the common reader rejoice
when he or she hears a plain-speaking Englishman pronounce his
beverage "a jolly good wine."
As these examples suggest, contemporary literary-oenological
styles of writing are diverse. However, that diversity is
superficial; in fact, the language that the majority of
American wine writers use falls into three categories. Two of
those were popular in the middle and late part of the 20th
century, when they were eclipsed (but not entirely obscured)
by a third style of rhetoric, which has become more and more
popular.
Until recently, Americans have described what they drink using
just two languages, both abstract and neither, oddly enough,
linked directly to wine: the language of social class and the
language of gender.
Of the two, the language of class has been the more pervasive.
In the 1964 edition of Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of
Wine, for example, Portugal's best red wine is characterized
as "full-bodied, extremely fruity, [but] somewhat lacking in
breed." By contrast, French Sauternes from Chateau Coutet is
praised for "great distinction and breed." Frontignan's
muscat, another sweet, French white wine, has "considerable
distinction and real class." (Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia grew
out of a series of wine columns in The New Yorker, published
around the time of the repeal of prohibition in 1933; until
recently, and through several editions, it has been the
American oenophile's bible.)
Although less ubiquitous, the vocabulary of gender has a more
venerable legacy than the language of class; it goes back at
least as far as the Victorian literary critic George
Saintsbury, who, according to Schoonmaker, described a red
Hermitage from France as "the manliest wine" he had ever
drunk. Like the language of class, the language of gender
bestows praise and blame, but in more nuanced shades.
The red wines of Morey-Saint-Denis and Chambolle-Musigny are
distinguished from each other thus: Morey's wines are "big,
hard, assertive -- the reverse in every way of the
Chambolles," which are "delicate and feminine, with beguiling
grace and a captivating, warming bouquet," according to the
early editions of Alexis Lichine's Encyclopedia of Wines and
Spirits in the 1950s.
For Lichine, who viewed the reds of Gevrey as "robust,
assertive and strictly masculine" and the whites of Meursault
as "soft, round, and feminine," the dichotomies of sex and
gender were fundamental to any understanding of wine. A
chateau owner whom Newsweek dubbed the pope of oenophiles
(according to the book jacket of Lichine's book), Lichine was
emphatic about that contrast when he wrote of French wine.
About the time of Frank Schoonmaker's death in 1976,
descriptions of wine in America began to shift from the
language of class and gender to the language of fruits and
vegetables. A recent Wines & Spirits account of a 1998
Argiolas Costera called it "a garden of southern Italian
flavors, from sun-baked black plums and fresh, fuzzy figs to
almonds, fennel, and cherries. Crisp, lemon-like acidity
provides the freshness of a sea breeze." Such passages suggest
that, like cookbooks, wine guides are modern forms of the
pastoral, a literary genre inventing idealized, imaginary, and
nonsensical images of country life for the amusement of city
dwellers.
This new pastoral language has been widely adopted in the
United States, and has also spread to France and the United
Kingdom, where the English translation of The Hachette Wine
Guide: The French Wine Bible declares that a La Clariere
Laithwaite offers aromas "of almond, cocoa, marsh flowers,
irises and undergrowth." The same lexicon pervades the wine
columns in The New York Times, which recently described a
glass of Madeira as "a big, full, brash wine [which] raced for
each corner of our palates, gushing oranges, golden raisins,
brandied cherries, licorice, mint, and maple sugar." Gushing
indeed.
Such descriptions focus on produce with a romantic, idyllic,
and halcyon aura. Banished are parsnips, onions, carrots,
potatoes, and other roots with lowly ties. Wine writing
recoils from vegetables that make gas or blight the breath,
like beans and garlic. Naturally, it shuns brussels sprouts,
broccoli, and other vegetables forced upon us as children.
It favors picturesque foods like asparagus; green, yellow, or
red bell peppers; lemons; oranges; and apples. And it goes for
fruits over nuts and vegetables, especially fruits that are
high in sugar. It is particularly fond of cherries, Asian
pears, peaches, melons, plums, figs, tangerines, lychees, and
pineapples. While it also shows a preference for exotic foods
like papaya, quince, guava, passion fruit, and mango, its
all-time favorite is the berry: strawberries, raspberries,
blackberries, boysenberries, mulberries, gooseberries,
cranberries, blueberries, and bilberries.
Although fruit lies at its core, the new nomenclature radiates
out in other directions, chiefly culinary. The Wine
Enthusiast's tasting notes for a bottle of Hidden Cellars
finds that its 1997 zinfandel displays "an appealing mix of
nut, cocoa, anise, oak, and black fruit on the palate. Opens
with paprika and cinnamon, plus cocoa aromas; closes with a
definitive vanilla-anise-oak tang." Along with an assortment
of herbs, spices, and baking ingredients, wine narratives
include everything found in today's kitchen: raw materials
like honey, olives, bacon, meat, and coffee; processed foods
like tapenade, marzipan, and chocolate; quasi-edibles like
violets, tea roses, dried leaves, beeswax, and green tobacco;
inedibles like oyster shells, camphor, and stones;
imponderables like "orange-scented peach," "precious, very
roasted wood," and the titillating "corrupt cherry."
Then there's this account of Standing Stone Pinot Noir, in
which "intense aromas of caramel-cola, black cherries, and wet
dog give way to a medium-weight, silky palate that offers dark
chocolate and cherry flavors." Other bizarre references
include new saddle leather, pencil lead, seaweed, ash, smoke,
Band-Aids, iodine, beef blood, and creosote. Who among us
distinguishes beef blood from, say, pig's or chicken's? And is
it really possible for one wine to smell of multiple,
antagonistic aromas like "coffee, violets, prunes, smoke,
toast, and game"?
Questions probing the accuracy of this new lingo lead to
broader ones about why it has won such widespread acceptance,
defining the way Americans perceive -- or imagine -- the 565
million gallons of wine they spend $19-billion on yearly.
One answer lies in an obscure but initially influential book
published the year Frank Schoonmaker died. In 1976, Maynard A.
Amerine (an oenologist) and Edward B. Roessler (a
mathematician) wrote Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation to
establish a scientific vocabulary of organoleptic terms --
expressions aiding in the sensory evaluation of wine. To that
end, the two professors offer a glossary amounting to an index
of forbidden wine-tasting words, though they do not give it
that undemocratic title. In a preface to their glossary, these
two professors from the University of California at Davis's
department of viticulture and oenology do admonish: "It is not
our intent to condemn the following terms (although some of
them deserve it) for your wine vocabulary, but merely to warn
you to use them with caution, if at all."
From the realm of class, Amerine and Roessler purge "coarse,"
"common," "breed," "elegant," "heavy," "noble," "ordinary,"
and "well-bred," reserving special scorn for "finesse." From
the sphere of gender, they outlaw "big," "masculine,"
"robust," "sturdy," "feminine," "fragrant," "lithe,"
"perfumed," and "delicate."
But Amerine and Roessler's book did not, by itself, banish the
vocabularies of class and gender. And though the book's
science (impressive algebraic formulas adorn the volume)
played a role in discrediting Schoonmaker's and others' aging
terminologies, it did not establish the pastoral paradigm
replacing them. The death of the old language and the birth of
the new followed a cultural shift in late-20th-century America
that has not drawn the comment it deserves.
In the United States (as in England), France and Italy have
long stood as models of contrasting cultural and social
styles. France represents urbanity, cynicism, artfulness,
formality, protocol, high theory, elitism, snobbery, and
propriety. Italy stands for naturalness, informality,
accessibility, practicality, spontaneity, optimism,
intuitiveness, and family feeling. Those contrasts are
apparent in movies, literary philosophy, couture, cuisine,
wine, and, most recently, education. (Italian styles of child
care, emphasizing creativity and spontaneity, are being
studied not just by Americans, but by the French themselves,
who now view their own system as overregimented.)
In the middle of the 20th century, when the specter of Italy's
fascist past still lingered, Americans looked to France for
cultural models. French was the language of diplomacy; the
adjective "French" was synonymous with the "best" in wines and
restaurants everywhere; movies by Truffaut and Godard defined
the avant-garde in cinema.
But when Reagan's "morning in America" political optimism and
Clinton's prosperity ushered in a period of serenity in the
1980s and '90s, an increasingly self-confident population
sought styles of living that embodied informality and familial
ease. That casualness drew Americans to Italy. Italian movies
like Cinema Paradiso, The Postman, and Life Is Beautiful
eclipsed French films in popularity; Bella Tuscany displaced A
Year in Provence, the latter enduring through so many sequels
only because it celebrated the Italian part of France.
Marcella Hazan trumped Julia Child; and impenetrable French
menus spawning tiny portions of food drowning in
egg-butter-cream sauces yielded to Italy's cornucopia
cuisines, prepared in olive oil, now elevated to a medical
wonder.
Following the triumph of its cuisines, Italy's Barberas, Pinot
Grigios, and Chianti Classicos began to challenge their French
rivals. Viewed as more accessible and less costly than
astronomically priced French wines, they brought with them the
pastoral associations and language of the Italian campagna.
Where these bucolic connections and vocabularies had been
embraced by oenophiles like Parker, the zest for all things
Italian nourished and sustained them, bestowing on such
pastoral allusions the naturalness and validity they needed to
take root and flourish.
Today, as a result, it is impossible to mass market any wine
on American television using French imagery. Political fashion
has helped discredit gender referents, so that to praise a
Rhone as "manly" or to speak of "the fragile yet resolute
charm of feminine wines" is to sound comically old-fashioned.
And economic pressure to market a worldwide glut of wine
(overproduction runs at 25 percent annually) has made
invidious allusions to social standing, high or low, seem
snooty. Meanwhile, creating Italian-sounding brands like
Mondavi, Gallo, Martini, and Sebastiani, or depicting large,
noisy families gathering around Mediterranean feasts has
become the preferred way to pitch wines, regardless of their
true nationality.
Finally, casting wine, in words or images, as so many heads by
the Milan painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (who fabricated
allegories of the seasons out of pears, peaches, cherries, and
nuts) gives it the appearance of a health food. Here at last
is a natural medicine that keeps the doctor away, but promises
to gratify the flesh, not mortify it. Composed of nature's
bounty drawn from the four seasons, wines enjoy irresistible
appeal to aging boomers obsessed with their physical
well-being. Reinvented as those fruits and vegetables touted
by physicians and governments as the best defense against
cancer -- not to mention heart disease, dementia, and hip
fractures -- wine metamorphoses into one of the most powerful
prophylactics in our pharmacological arsenal, along with olive
oil and green tea.
Clearly, unlike literary critics and art historians, wine
critics have failed to invent a dialect of their own to
describe precisely what they do. Wine writers are loosely
organized into two adversarial camps, researchers and
marketers. The first, located in winery labs or universities,
is committed to pruning oenoleptic diction back to a limited
number of exact, scientific terms, but that camp is too
obscure to achieve its goals. The second camp, operating in
glossy magazines, prestigious daily papers, and $50-a-year
newsletters, is committed to the hard sell, by expanding the
language of wine through imagination and expressiveness.
Devoted to the "poetry" of the grape, these wine "rappers"
resemble nomads who wander from one landscape to another,
gleaning their next crop of terms to mythologize their next
vintage. As their search leads them farther and farther
afield, it yields literary harvests that are increasingly
fantastic and improbable.
If current writing is the barometer of the next oenological
wave, chronicles of wines as "hedonistic," "pretty and
caressing," "ravishing," "pillowy," "seductive," and
"overendowed" point to the erotic, affirming the view that, in
the kaleidoscope of Americans' fixations, gastronomy has
eclipsed sex.
Sean Shesgreen is a professor of English at Northern Illinois
University and the author, most recently, of Images of the
Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Rutgers
University Press, 2002).
_________________________________________________________________
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education