Ahem.

ALCOHOL ABUSE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

Now that that’s out of the way, on to the links.

• Yeast and sugar may be the answer to cheap power in Africa. Our mighty wine soldiers have so many fun uses.

  According to the inventor, Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, this multi-chambered hamster wheel yeast spinner has the potential to “generate power for cell phones, $100 laptops, and other things in Africa. People can leave this thing to charge their phones/$100 laptops overnight.”

  The good doctor is looking for investors, so click through if you are feeling philanthropic.

• New website Rules of Thumb has a wine section. My favorite rule of thumb: “A winery’s standards start to slip if it produces more than 50,000 cases of wine per year,” by Chalone founder and COO Dick Graff. Link.
• 8 Straight Benefits of Red Wine over at Dumb Little Man. The French government may want to remind their citizens that ALCOHOL ABUSE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH, but according to lots of other research moderate consumption has many healthful benefits. Which I’m sure you already knew. But did you know this? Red wine correlates with reduced risk of death from nearly all causes. Good times.
• Last but certainly not least, Jeff at Indiscriminate Ideas tried out the pinotblogger steak recipe and declared it a “phenomenal way to cook a steak and one that you need to try soon.”

Right on. Thanks Jeff! If you’d like to rock the pinotblogger steak tonight, the instructions are here.

Have a fantastic weekend.

Photojojo has a kinda cool tip for turning your wine glasses into creative picture frames up on their blog.

This could be an interesting project to undertake for a party where you somehow had a picture of every attendee available – and had the patience to make these ahead of time. If done right though I think the results could be remarkable, especially at a winery event.

There are a few drawbacks though. They include:

• Not being able to wash your glasses without melting your pictures.
• You can’t see through Pinot (or any red wine for that matter), which drops the coolness factor precipitously.
• You have to look at your own wildly distorted visage while you drink. For me at least, this is a real deal breaker. I look goofy enough without throwing in the funhouse mirror effect. That’s just piling on.

Still, if you’re the Martha Stewart type and are feeling crafty, the tutorial and all the gritty details are here.

So, as promised, here are the results of a survey of 8 wineries and their sanitation levels presented by Dr. Worobo at a seminar last week. (Click picture to enlarge)

The main takeaway is that no winery is perfect. Floors and drains are the most likely places to find bugs. Bung holes also tend to be pretty filthy, which I guess is to be expected. Still it’s an area that goes overlooked in a bunch of wineries and looks to be a pretty easily removed vector for spoilage orgs. I’ll definitely make sure bung hole cleaning is SOP at Capozzi.

Every winery’s bottling line was impeccable, as were their stainless steel tanks after a good cleaning. Hooray!

Checking Sanitation

The best way to check the cleanliness of your stuff is to do a quick measurement using a pricey but oh-so-convenient luminometer. I uploaded a video of Randy giving a demonstration on one of Rodney Strong’s tanks that had just been cleaned. (I apologize that you’ll have to crane your head to view it for the moment. When I get home I’ll try and fix the video).

Definitely a quick and cool way to check your area for spoilage, keep the workers or yourself honest, and to put your mind at ease. According to Randy they run anywhere from $400 to $2300 bucks.

Randy also mentioned that Ecolab has been working on getting more winery specific products and more knowledgeable reps to better serve the wine industry (Zep – 1-877-I-BUY-ZEP – is another). As part of your relationship with them, they should be able to walk your winery, point out any problems and identify the products and solutions that will help you get your winery spic and span.

And as we all know, a clean bung hole is a godly bung hole. Amen.

Yesterday I drove down the road to attend a 2 hour winery sanitation seminar put on at Rodney Strong winery by Vinquiry. It was pretty informative and I thought I’d share the main takeaways here for anyone interested in keeping their cellar a bit more clean.

And just so I don’t keep you in suspense, the answer is that your bung holes are filthy.

Just filthy.

And to save any uninterested wine consumers from having to read this whole thing to get any value, here’s the take away for you: it really does matter if the winery you are visiting or buying wine from is clean or not.

They don’t scrub-a-dub just to show off to tour groups. If you visit a winery with less than stellar sanitary conditions, you can be assured that you’ll most likely find the foul stench of Brett lurking in their wines at some point.

The seminar started with a presentation of some research on Brett by Neil Brown, a researcher working at Vinquiry. He went over the results of some tests he did on two strains of Brett and the growth cycle he found in Pinot Noir. Below is a simplified graph combining data from 4 trials that I created based on the information he provided (click image to enlarge).

A few interesting things from the graph:

• At 70 days there is no Brett, even though each sample was inoculated. Neil thinks that the yeast hang out in some from and bide their time until conditions in the wine become more favorable for them.
• There was no residual sugar in the wines he used, and they were all sterile filtered, so it’s not clear what the Brett was feeding off of. Alcohol in the Pinots shot down from 15.27% after fermentation to 13.75% however, so it could be those crafty Brett are using alcohol as food. I suppose this means that if you want to lower the alcohol in your wine and like some major sweaty horse blanket smells in your pinot, feel free to inoculate with Brett.
• I haven’t shown the formation of 4-EP or 4-EG (which are responsible for the animal and medicinal smell that we associate with Brett) in the graph, but they both rocket up to the red line somewhere between 250 and 350 days. The earliest 4-EP was detectable was just after 70 days and in very low concentrations.

Neil recommends microscope work during fermentation to check for spoilage orgs, and then recommends having the wine plated at around 90 days to check for Brett. I’d think maybe even sooner based on the data, say at 80 days.

An important caveat to the experiment is that no SO2 was used on the wines, so you shouldn’t expect results like this unless you’re making Roman Syrah (no SO2) or some other craziness.

But the main point about Brett that Neil passed along is that it is nearly impossible to eradicate from the winery completely. The buggers can only be controlled through proper sanitation applied religiously.

And that’s when Dr. Randy Worobo from Cornell jumped in and went over best practices in winery sanitation. It all boils down to a 5 step process.

1. Pre-rinse your crap.
2. Apply detergent, rotating between acid and alkali solutions, and scrub your crap. Then scrub it again.
3. Rinse your crap thoroughly.
4. Sanitize your crap with a 4 day on and 1 day off rotation of a peracetic acid/H2O2 combination and quaternary ammonium. (4 days acid/H2O2, then QUATS on Friday just before you leave for the weekend because it keeps your crap sanitized for longer periods of time).
5. Rinse your crap again, lovingly.

He also shared the results of a survey he performed on 8 wineries that show just how filthy most of our cellars actually are.

I’ll leave that for tomorrow since I’m running out of time. More then, including a video with a demonstration of a neat little gadget that’ll tell you exactly how filthy your ball valves and bung holes actually are (read: soiled).

Just a quick note that I’ll be out in Ukiah on Thursday for a PR conference put on by the Mendocino Winegrape and Wine Commision. I’ll be talking about blogging and PR/Branding for (shudder) about an hour. Hopefully everyone won’t be glassy-eyed and drooling by the time I’m done.

I’m told there’s wireless, so part of the talk will be spent showing off the best of the wine blogosphere. If your ears start burning and your logs show any hits from Ukiah CA, you’ll know that was me.

Then next Monday I’ll be hanging out in the studio of KSVY in Sonoma with producer Randy Hall and Kaz on their Wine Biz show. I believe we’ll be touching on precision viticulture and the controversy surrounding its use. Should be a blast.

Finally next month I’ll be participating in the keynote panel at the annual Wine Industry Technology Symposium with a few other fine fellows including Philip James from Snooth.com (who just started their open beta, congrats!). I’ll be giving a shortened version of the Mendo talk and hopefully contributing a little value to the roundtable discussion. If you happen to make either of these events please head on up and say what’s up.

It’s good to be home. Candace and I just got back from a cruise to Alaska with two very good friends and are still readjusting to life on land. It was tough being away from our 10-month-old for that long, but the sleep and general relaxation were wonderful. You don’t realize just how sleep deprived you really are until you get to actually sleep in for the first time in nearly a year.

Still, the trip could have been better and so much more enjoyable if I’d been able to bring my own friggin’ wine on board. Royal Caribbean, the cruise line I sailed on, is typical of the cruise industry in general in that they allow no wine whatsoever to be brought aboard. A few cruise lines allow one bottle per person plus a $15 corkage fee, but that’s still absolutely pitiful for a 7 day cruise.

There are only three cruise lines that allow you to bring unlimited amounts of wine and champagne on board. A fourth, Costa Cruises, allows a “limited amount” to be brought on board, but it must be consumed in the dining rooms. The three that allow unlimited wine are Holland America, Cunard and Norwegian Coastal Voyage. Holland and Cunard both charge a $15 fee per bottle, while Norwegian Costal allows you to consume as much as you want – as long as it isn’t in a “public area”. Oh really, what about the dining room?

I love wine, but I’m not prepared to hole up in my stateroom and drink it alone, Leaving Las Vegas style. I guess you could always order room service, but c’mon, you’re not a leper. Hell, smokers have more freedom on cruise ships than wine lovers do!

After perusing the wine list on Royal Caribbean I would have gladly paid a $15 corkage fee to escape drinking the insipid fare they were offering. The most specific appellation I was able to find on the menu was Sonoma County, and the rest were from notable terroirs like California, Australia or New Zealand. Just awful.

So I thought I’d try my best to save you my misery when planning your next cruise. Below is a list of what each cruise line allows you carry on, how much they charge for corkage, and whether or not you can actually drink your favorite beverage among your fellow cruisers. The info comes directly from this article in the Columbus Dispatch and was originally published in the Washington Post, so it might all be rubbish. You never know with reporters these days .

Holland America Line

Unlimited wine and champagne are allowed.
Corkage fee: $15 a bottle.

Cunard Line

Wine and champagne are allowed.
Corkage fee: $15 a bottle.

Norwegian Coastal Voyage

Any legal alcohol is allowed for consumption in the cabin.
Corkage fee: Does not apply; no bottles may be brought into public areas of the ship.\

Costa Cruises

Guests may arrange to bring a limited amount of wine.
Corkage fee: $10 plus gratuity.

Celebrity Cruises

Two bottles per stateroom are allowed.
Corkage fee: $25 a bottle.

Carnival Cruise Lines

One bottle per adult (21 or older) and only on the day of embarkation. Any other alcohol can be confiscated with no compensation.
Corkage fee: Carnival charges $10 a bottle to have the wine or champagne opened in the dining room, $14 in the Supper Club.

Princess Cruises

One bottle per person is allowed.
Corkage fee: $15.

Royal Caribbean

No carry-on alcohol is allowed. Security reserves the right to inspect containers such as water, soda and mouthwash bottles and dispose of any alcohol.
Corkage fee: Does not apply.

Norwegian Cruise Line

No wine allowed.
Corkage fee: $15 per bottle of wine bought onshore during cruise, which must be consumed in the dining rooms.

MSC Cruises
No wine allowed.
Corkage fee: Does not apply.

From the UCD Trellis Alliance:

If you are a CSI New York fan, you may want to watch on March 21. They are doing an episode where they are going to attempt to identify a wine fraud. It’s not clear exactly what they’re going to do or show (and how realistic it will be), but it might be fun to watch.

If you are interested in REAL methods for authentication of wine and other foods, we found out about a new book that has just been published:

Authentication of Food and Wine

Interesting and topical considering that fake wine has been in the news quite a bit lately. But you don’t need to spend 170 bucks on a tome like the one linked to above to avoid buying fake wine, just take Steve Bachmann over at Vinfolio’s advice:

Pay attention to provenance and be prepared to pay more for when it’s solid — it’s worth it.

How much more is the real question. Steve figures for older vintages a 30% premium is the going rate. Be sure to have a look at his full post for all the details.

Over at Grape Radio they’ve produced a tremendous podcast on Pinot Noir clones moderated by former UCD professor Carole Meredith. Really great info for both enthusiasts and producers alike.

Thanks to the Grape Radio folks for recording and providing this great seminar from World of Pinot Noir 2006.

Check it out.

St. Zini is celebrating the Solstice. Head over to the Zinquisition and join in the festivities and watch him wallow in the fecund embrace the earth mother. Quick sampling of the BioD brilliance that awaits you:

stand behind cow to gather fresh “poo” – take care not to slip in yesterday’s “poo”…

take magical cow horns off shelf, and pack with freshly gathered “poo”

bury magical horn filled with “poo” (ensure it’s in a East-West orientation, with the wide opening pointing east so the horn will “catch” all of the incoming cosmic energy…)

wash hands with dynamized water (only homemade nettle-flower soap to be used) to get rid of excess “poo”

Amazingly, it gets even better. Post of the year.

On Saturday Pinotblogger turned 1 year old. To celebrate here’s a link to the best, most in depth wine information I know of on the net, brought to you by the fine folks at the UCD Trellis Alliance.

What they’ve done is to summarize and make explicit the practical applications of recent research in the fields of viticulture and enology. Here’s how they describe it:

Although there is a great deal of research data published regularly in journals and scientific publications, it is often difficult to locate those articles and then to take the time to read and assess them. And they are often written to be reviewed by other researchers and/or academics, so their practical, or applied, value may be difficult to discern.
So, our technical writers have chosen to review these articles in a concise yet comprehensive style, to accurately represent the original author’s conclusions, but to do so in a more approachable way whenever possible.

Really fantastic stuff. Here’s the link. Enjoy.