Tannin-rich foods pt. 2: Wine

Wine, particularly red wines, can be tannin-rich. The tannins in wine are often blamed for red wine headache, and impart a dry bitterness and distinctive taste. The tannins come mainly from skin, seeds and stems present during the fermentation process (which is why red wines tend to be more tannin heavy) but can also be imparted from oak barrels that are often used for storage. Anti-oxidant tannins also play an important role in the aging process - as a wine ages, the tannins precipitate out reducing the harshness of the wine. Because of this, tannin-rich wines benefit more from the aging process than those with a lower tannin content.

Now, I don't have time to wait around several years for my wine to age properly. That's why I drink beer. But if you love wine and are impatient here is the product for you. The Perfect Sommelier is essentially a powerful magnet. Place a bottle on the magnetic coaster, and replace the cork with the magnetic cap - wait 15-30 minutes and presto! your wine tastes as though it's been aged for years. (This is not unlike the wine clip which claims to do the same thing, only faster!) Both products have 'scientific'" explanations for how they work - something about using the magnets to align polar tannin molecules - and oodles of testimonials. I'm not ready to cry 'quack' yet since the nuances of wine taste are a difficult to measure and any such test would be subjective, but I don't think I buy it. Of course, my unrefined palate and I are skeptical of Sideways-esque wine tasting and wines with "the faintest soupçon of asparagus and just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese." Still, one independent test showed that tasters were unable to tell the difference between treated and untreated wine, or identfied a difference but were wrong half the time (the writer of that critique also has "a background in Electromagentic fields from MIT" and claims there "really is no scientific explanation as to why a little magnet would change the tannic structure or acidic content of a wine").

So, rather than try to make a bad wine good with an overpriced magnet, save your money and invest in learning about real good wines, like with Sommelier for the Nintendo DS. Or just buy a few bottles, do your own tasting, and find ones you like. I'll even help you pick them, but I am NOT drinking any fucking merlot!

Wine science

What happens when you combine two things that I love: wine and science? Well you just have to listen to our latest podcast to find out (hint: it's not pretty). But please let me elaborate on this topic... The wine industry has dramatically changed in recent years. It's been a difficult process. Once a local product, from small traditional wineries, wine producers have had to adapt to globalization. First demand for wine began to grow worldwide, as new markets opened up in Anglo-Saxon countries (Canada, United-States, Australia, UK), and increasingly more in Asia. Wine was making producing countries, mostly France, Spain and Italy, very rich, and they felt unstoppable. Then new-world wines came in and spoiled their party. The European view of wines, as having secret traditional recipes, where the soil and region is what matters most was replaced with the "Australian" way, were productivity and reproducibility of the taste were the modus operandi. We may have lost something in the way, but wine-making was ripe for some technology. The Australians perfected mass production, and figured out ingenious ways to reproducibly create tastes that would appeal to mass markets. The French as usual, were unimpressed and accused the new wines as being catered to the lowest common denominator, to lack subtle aromas and regional variability, yet they were left unable to compete. It looks like they are now ready to fight back, and reclaim their former wine-making glory. The French teamed up with the Italians to sequence the grape genome. Even the cultivar is meaningful, they chose pinot noir which is the current darling of winos out there (curse you Sideways). Even Affymetrix now has a pinot noir gene array. And what they found was interesting, by agricultural selection, genomic loci encoding taste, and smell have been amplified. This opens up the door to transgenic grapes, with new and improved flavours and pest resistance (yay, no more sulfites). Or why not skip the grape and go straight to synthetic wines. In any case, a bold step from countries which have traditionally been very anti-GMO...

Chocolate-Funded Researchers Fudging the Data?

Unfortunately, corporations seem to have perfected the art of corrupting academic research to help up their street cred and push their products. It's fairly simple to do if you have a decent sized budget and can be accomplished in three easy steps:

1. Throw lots of soft money into funding research chairs, grants, conferences, lectures, consultancies, etc. for cash-strapped scientists at public institutions to investigate your product. Remember, "industry-funded research is 4 to 8 times more likely than independently funded research to result in findings favorable to the sponsor".
   
2. See what they produce and reward those who put out positive results with continued funding, while cutting support when you get results that don't help you sell products. It's survival of the fittest - but don't worry, the theory of evolution is public domain and can be freely exploited without necessitating royalty payments to the descendants of Charles Darwin.
3. After a few cycles of this "directed evolution of truth" the data should more or less be saying what you want. Polish things off by having your scientific pawns publish drastically over-hyped and over-stated interpretations of their data in a peer-reviewed journal, the higher the impact factor the better. Boisterously announce the publication of these findings with an even more over-hyped press release to major media outlets. Don't forget to to reward your peons with an all-expenses paid trip or at least a nice dinner party. Or maybe a chocolate bar.
   

I think the big pharmas were probably one of the first to use this method to beef up the street cred of their drugs, and more recently other industries like the winemakers have been getting into the action. Sure...a glass of red wine a day is the key to longevity because it contains flavonoids. Then again, if you're really after health, you could always skip out on the toxic alcohol content and just eat a grape or drink some juice.

Anyway, now it's chocolate-funded research, and things are just getting so ridiculous it's funny. This great article by blogger Mark Klempner describes how the Mars bar company is manipulating academia to demonstrate the supposed benefits of the "flavanols" in their products, while of course ignoring the massive negative effects of the sugars and fats they contain. I mean come on, we're talking about JUNK FOOD here. I would be embarrassed to be associated with a would-be serious academic institution such as the University of California at Davis, who support a Mars bar endowed chair in nutrition and have allowed their researchers to recieve at total of $10 million in research funding from the chocolate bar maker. Maybe they should be calling themselves something like "Department of Junk Food and Obesity Promotion, University of Mars Bar at Davis" instead. These guys even have a paper in PNAS that is commonly cited on chocolate industry propaganda websites. On these sites you can find quotes from people at the center of this conflict of interest, like Harold Schmitz, Mars Chief Scientific Officer and UC Davis visiting professor in nutrition: "Traditional cocoa processing often destroys the flavanols, but Mars technology helps to retain these naturally occurring nutrients from cocoa. This new research emphasizes the importance of understanding the potential public health applications of emerging cocoa science, which is a challenge we take very seriously at Mars." Priceless.

The saddest part is that it's usually not obvious, when you read a paper like this, see a poster or hear a talk, that the research has been funded for corporate gain. Instead you're just left wondering why you've wasted your time listening to a bunch of meaningless, over-stated, irrelevent and massaged data disguised to look like science.

Great piece though, and I think he's bang on. The Brave New World reference is interesting although disconcerting. (Naturally, Klempner manages to tie global waming into his article as well).