→ September 17, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

  • Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.
  • Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.
  • The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”
  • Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.
  • An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.
  • Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.
  • Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.
  • Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.
  • Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.
  • Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.
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→ February 3, 2019
→ By

Cork Dork.

Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste is experiential non-fiction that manages to maintain its balance even when the author might have had trouble maintaining hers. She took a year to try to prepare for and pass a sommelier exam, something that would normally take three years, and along the way learned about the science of taste and smell, experienced the strange subcultures of sommeliers and wine snobs, and drank a tremendous amount of wine. A good friend of mine who worked in one of the restaurants mentioned in the book recommended it to me a year or so ago, and it’s both entertaining and, since I knew and still know very little about wine, informative.

Bosker went from writing about technology to complete immersion in the wine world to prepare for that exam and write this book, which meant learning a lot of about wine – its history, its manufacture, its varieties – and the restaurant culture around wine as well. Sommeliers are expected to be experts in wine, people who know everything on the wine list and can recommend bottles to customers based on their tastes and on what food the customers wish to order, but who are also there to sell wine; alcohol is often, perhaps nearly always, the biggest profit center for any restaurant that sells it. The sommelier exam involves not only identifying wines during a blind tasting, but a test of service, with a judge pretending to be a difficult customer and judging the candidate on physical service and how well the candidate answers questions.

To speed up the process, Bosker throws herself into the work of learning how to identify wines, including visits to researchers in olfactory science – by far the book’s most interesting section, as she explains how olfaction (smell) was long denigrated as the least important sense and one unworthy of serious scientific study. You may already know that most of what we classify as “taste,” whether for food or for libations, is actually smell, and that the traditional “taste map” of the tongue is so much hot garbage, a relic from pre-scientific ideas of anatomy. How wine is served – in what vessels, at what temperature – affects what chemicals escape from the wine and make it into our noses for our brains to identify, and thus how we perceive the wine’s flavors. To learn these scents, she bought a kit to better train her nose, which is a thing I did not realize you could do – in fact, people with olfactory deficiencies can improve their senses of smell by, of all things, practice. (I passed this along to Will Leitch, who lost his sense of smell to a childhood illness, and he expressed the understandable concern of regaining something he has no real memory of having.)

Bosker does gloss over one significant question that still dogs the world of wine, from sommeliers to independent wine criticism, although she mentions it in passing numerous times. There are many experts, including a handful of economists like Princeton’s Orley Ashenfelter, who developed a formula based on weather data that predicted Robert Parker’s famous wine scores, who say wine reviews and evaluations are largely bullshit. Wines are among the most chemically complex things we consume, with hundreds of chemicals responsible for the array of aromas that produce the ‘notes’ experts profess to find in wine – although Bosker concedes that some of these notes are pretentious folderol made up to impress consumers. The debate is whether anyone can train their noses and palates to detect so many different notes in a few sips and sniffs of any bottle. You could ascertain this via mass spectrometry, and the knowledge of the aromas produced by specific chemicals in wine as led to an entire industry of factory-produced wines that are assembled additive by additive. Can experts actually discern these? I’m doubtful; Bosker doesn’t delve into this deeply enough.

That skepticism colored my reading of anything in Cork Dork pertaining to the exams, whether the basic sommelier’s exam she takes or the master sommelier exam that made the news last year when one of the judges leaked answers to the tasting portion. Are we testing something real? How much of these results represent actual skill in wine detection, and how much is just good guessing? And how much do we need to know or understand to just enjoy wine? The same characteristics that distinguish wines grown in different terroirs in different seasons can also appear in coffee and chocolate, two products I particularly enjoy, but identifying the different notes in a single-origin coffee doesn’t make me appreciate the cup any more. Perhaps I’m just an oeno-philistine, but as much as I liked Cork Dork, I also found myself shaking my head at the hoops through which Bosker and other wine geeks had to leap to get that sommelier certification – and still don’t know to what extent that test actually measures something real.

Next up: I just started Tommy Orange’s novel There There, which I’ve seen mentioned as a potential Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner this year and is indeed named after the Radiohead song.

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→ July 21, 2015
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Proof: The Science of Booze.

Adam Rogers’ book Proof: The Science of Booze delivers handsomely on its title: It’s a book about adult beverages, and it will make you want to go drink some, but it also gives quite a bit of information on the (light) science involved in the production of and flavors behind those libations, especially distilled spirits. While some of the stories around booze manufacturing get too bogged down in operational details, there are also magnificent anecdotes within the book, including the best mystery you’ll ever read where the culprit is a fungus.

Rogers divides the book into eight chapters, each revolving around some essential element of alcohol production – yeast, sugar, fermentation, distillation, aging – or its consumption – smell/taste, body and brain, and the hangover. That gives him the latitude to talk about just about anything he wants that’s related to the manufacture of sauce and suds, including but hardly limited to some deep dives on what we do and don’t know about the science of such beverages.

Alcoholic beverages, especially distilled spirits – often called “hard liquors,” produced by putting some alcohol-containing mixture through a still, leading to whiskey (from fermented grain mash, like that created in beer production), brandy (typically from wine), rum (from fermented molasses or sugar cane), vodka (usually potatoes), and so on – have dozens or even hundreds of aromatic and flavor compounds, some of which still aren’t identified, that give them their distinctive tastes and smells. When you sip an aged spirit, often whiskey but applicable to rum and brandy as well, you may pick up “notes” much like you’d identify in good wines or coffees; those notes are specific chemicals or combinations of chemicals formed during the aging process, sometimes on their own and sometimes due to the interactions between the spirit and the wooden (sometimes charred wooden) casks in which they’re housed.

Rogers explores this angle, and many others, with visits to artisanal producers of these various beverages, moving his writing lens from wide shot to close-up and back, extrapolating from individual producers’ experiences to discuss larger points that he can back up (sometimes) with science. He talks about the obsessions distillers have with the shapes of their stills, even trying to reproduce flaws in old stills when it comes time to replace them with new ones. He talks to a barrel maker – apparently this is about as dying as a dying art can be without being, you know, dead – about the specifics of manufacture and the demands of clients. He gets into the lactones formed during the aging of whiskey in wood barrels, a subject so critical it’s even been the topic of academic research. He also compares production of alcoholic beverages from eastern and western cultures; where Europeans relied heavily on Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Japanese beverages such as sake and shōchū come from a mold called koji (Aspergillus oryzae).

Speaking of molds and fungi, the best passage in Proof is, by far, the mystery of the whiskey fungus, practically a detective story about one man’s quest to identify a specific organism growing on buildings near a particular whiskey distillery. The distilling term “angel’s share” refers to the portion of a distilled spirit lost to evaporation during the aging process, usually water but sometimes a mixture of water and ethanol, the latter of which attracts certain fungi that will be found growing on surfaces where the evaporated alcohol may condense. The story Rogers tells is told in greater scientific detail in this free Mycologia journal article – you probably still have that back issue at home – which describes the mycologists’ development of a new genus to encompass these molds, including Baudoinia compniacensis, now identified as the “angel’s share fungus.” Rogers infuses the story with a bit more drama than the journal piece does, of course.

Rogers even gets involved in the debate over wine ratings, where the American Association of Wine Economists (led in part by the perfectly-named economist Richard Quandt) is among the leaders in arguing that the judgment of wine experts like Robert Parker is too subjective to have any value. Quandt and Orley Ashenfelter, who also appears in Ian Ayres’ book Super Crunchers, are in effect the leading sabermetricians of oenology, whereas Parker is … I don’t know, Old Scout or something. Quandt even wrote his own manifesto comparable to Percentage Baseball or early Bill James Abstracts, called “On Wine Bullshit“. Rogers takes a somewhat middle road here, pointing out that truly objective wine measures are impossible until we’ve identified all of the molecules responsible for their flavors and aromas, but I thought he sided with the quants – as will many of you, I’d wager.

As only a casual drinker but one who greatly enjoys a well-aged rum and a well-mixed cocktail, I found Proof (which I listened to as an audiobook) both entertaining and informative, aside from the occasional tangent into manufacturing minutiae. I wish he’d spent a little more time on spirits beyond whiskey, but brandy gets a fair shake and I may merely be expressing my pro-rum bias. If you tipple, you’ll enjoy this book.

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→ May 8, 2014
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A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

Klawchat at 1 pm ET today.

Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses gives a light, high-level history of six beverages that all had an impact on human history or development. I’m a big fan of four of them – beer, distilled spirits, coffee, and tea – and won’t turn down the fifth, wine. Only the last of the six Standage covers, Coca-Cola, seems out of place, both based on my personal tastes (I’ll only drink it if I have a headache and can’t have more coffee) and on its status as a thoroughly artifical beverage protected by trade secrets.

Standage has to stretch on occasion to make some of his historical connections, but in general he’s treading on safe ground, especially with beer and liquor, because their development or discovery had substantial economic impacts on the societies that consumed them. Beer was originally both a natural byproduct of grain storage and a safer alternative to water in an era when bacterial contamination was not understood; liquor, notably rum, drove international trade routes, agricultural production in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the slave trade with native kingdoms in western Africa. Wine was an essential part of the symposion, the Greek ancestor of the cocktail party, where great discussions took place in an atmosphere of convivial drinking … and probably excessive drinking, too, although Plato seems to have left that part out of his Dialogues.

Standage connects coffee to the academic cafe culture of western Europe, particularly London, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the coffee was bad, prepared in large pots in advance and reheated to order, but these cafes, each of which was devoted to a specific subject or area, hosted conversations that led to great advances in areas from science to philosophy. Tea, like coffee, brought medical benefits, especially since water had to be boiled to make the beverage, and became the drink of choice in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a shift that led to the British colonization and development of India (for their own purposes, of course, and only after they’d wiped out the subcontinent’s native textile industry) … as well as playing a role in our own revolution against the crown.

Where Standage lost the plot a little was with his shift to an overtly commercial product, Coca-Cola, which was the product of a handful of accidents and experiments and did, as the legend has it, once contain cocaine – the name comes from its onetime use of both the coca plant and the kola nut (a natural source of caffeine) as flavoring agents. The Coca-Cola company did play a role in the post-World War II trend of globalization, but its role was hardly as essential or as organic as those of the other five beverages in the book, and unlike the other drinks Standage covers, cola has no redeeming health qualities and is unhealthful even in small quantities.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses concludes with a prediction, in Standage’s epilogue, that the next beverage to direct human history will be the first one: water, with the need for clean, reliable water supplies directing political strategies and conflicts over the next century. That could have earned a larger chapter, similar to the discussion of the topic in Empires of Food, as it’s going to be a significant issue all over the world, including in the southern half of the United States. I also wish Standage had spent some time discussing the chemistry of each beverage, or more details of its production; he focuses far more on the history aspect of each drink than the scientific or culinary angles. The idea of “notes” in different beverages, widely used in discussions of wine but popping up more and more in reviews of beers, coffees, and even chocolates, derives from the differing chemical composition of the raw materials, which is usually a function of the soil and temperature where those materials grow. Those specific characteristics help drive the higher ends of the markets for each product, which in turn represents a path for coffee and cocoa farmers (and perhaps farmers of other crops) in developing countries to earn an actual living from their work, the kind of economic development that Standage discusses in a historical context in his six primary sections.

Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. I’m not sure this lawsuit is ever going to be settled.

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→ January 12, 2011
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The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in almost two years, since reading The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in February of 2009. Vinegar is a bit of literary pinot noir, starting with the auction of a bottle of wine allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson and left in Paris when he fled the Revolution, a sale that smashed the previous record for a single bottle and helped accelerate the trend of high sale prices for ultra-rare wines. Of course, we wouldn’t have a book about it if there wasn’t an underlying controversy. Was the wine legitimate, or was Hardy Rodenstock, the German who purportedly discovered the cache of wines, a fraud and a forger of the highest order?

The ability to make money through doctored wines wouldn’t exist with a market willing to pay top dollar for what those wines purported to be, and Wallace documents the role of auction houses, particularly Christie’s, in marketing and selling rare wines and troves to a changing market, one that saw collectors bidding up bottles as investments or trophies rather than as libations. The man who built Christie’s wine-selling business over a period of four decades, Michael Broadbent, is a central character in the book for his role in selling the Rodenstock/Jefferson wines and impact on the rare-wine industry. (Michael’s son, Bartholomew, makes a few cameos, and has become a successful importer of fine wines.) The rich men who chase these wines also become significant characters in the book, including millionaire scion and America’s Cup winner Bill Koch, fellow scion Kip Forbes, and wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who bought one of the Jefferson bottles only to damage it and have most of the wine leak out on a restauarant floor as he carried the bottle to show off during a tasting.

The is-it-real storyline is paramount in Billionaire’s Vinegar, but, as an oeneophyte, I found the lay descriptions of wine chemistry fascinating, particularly explanations of how wine’s character changes over time, which also ties into how someone might alter a wine to make it seem older than it is – and how difficult it was until very recently to test a wine to determine, even within a narrow range, its age. The book also dabbles in the politics of wine manufacturing, culture, marketing, and the culture of wine connoisseurs, including massive tastings like “verticals” (many different vintages of a single wine) or “horizontals” (many wines, one year).

But at heart, the book is a mystery, starring Rodenstock and Broadbent, both eccentrics given to showmanship and bravado, one a dealer, the other an auctioneer, one a German of unknown background, the other a Brit of impeccable credentials. (Other eminent authorities on wine also gave their imprimatur to Rodenstock’s Jefferson wines, including Robert Parker, the most influential American wine critic of the past three decades and creator of the now-ubiquitous 100-point scale for rating wines.) The answer to the question of the wines’ provenance isn’t that hard to figure out, but Wallace plays it straight, only gradually revealing more information as the people involved the story themselves would have learned it, giving the book that mystery/detective feel – not to mention a surfeit of narrative greed – that sets it apart from most nonfiction books I read. I needed to put this book down so I could do other things, but found myself picking it back up repeatedly, finishing it inside of 72 hours.

Of note: the book is actually not available for sale in the U.K. because Michael Broadbent sued and wrangled a settlement from Random House, although he didn’t name Wallace in the suit and, having read the book, I’m hard-pressed to understand Broadbent’s complaint from a my non-lawyerly perspective. Wallace himself stated that U.K. libel laws are “notoriously plaintiff-friendly,” and I have to say that Broadbent might only have brought more bad publicity for himself by drawing attention to the book. He hardly comes off worst of the many shady characters populating the book’s pages.

Next up: Humorist and erstwhile sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, a compendium of mini-essays on various words and their etymologies.

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→ October 3, 2009
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Everyday Drinking.

My introduction to Kingsley Amis came through his comic novel Lucky Jim, but Amis was also a prolific columnist on the subject of alcoholic beverages. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis combines two previous anthologies of Amis essays on drink (1973’s primer On Drink and 1983’s collection of newspaper columns Everyday Drinking) with a series of ten-question quizzes, originally published under the title How’s Your Glass?. Although there’s a bit of repetition – mostly of information but occasionally of jokes – between the first and second sections, the volume is educational and extremely witty, plenty to hold the attention of an occasional drinker like myself.

Each essay or column is built around a specific topic, usually a specific drink or class of drink, with digressions on topics like how to drink without getting a hangover, how to stock a liquor cabinet, or the decline of the English pub (so strongly felt that he delivers the same rant twice). Amis’s chief skill in writing these essays, aside from an apparently indefatigable liver, is blending strident opinion with direct advice so that his lectures don’t become shrill or dull.

His essay on liqueurs, for example, starts with an explanation of where that class of beverage originated (from preserving fruits in spirits) to discussions of a few major types to a digression on Southern Comfort, including his discussion of a drink called a Champagne Comfort:

Champagne Comfort is not a difficult drink to imagine, or to make, or to drink. My advice is to stop after the first one unless you have the rest of the day free.

Amis lays into any practice of which he disapproves, referring to lager and lime as “an exit application from the human race if ever there was one” (it’s listed in the index under “lager and lime, unsuitability for higher primates of, 170”) or as a Harvey Wallbanger as a “famous or infamous cocktail … named after some reeling idiot in California.” He expounds on Champagne as “only half a drink. The rest is a name on a label, an inflated price tag, a bit of tradition and a good deal of showing off.” There are several columns and one section on how to stiff your guests by shorting their drinks or by fawning over their wives so the women will defend you to their grousing husbands on the drives home.

While Amis is busy amusing you, he’s educating you on the history and processes of drink as well as offering suggestions and recommendations, even on wine, a beverage he professes to dislike. Understanding drink means understanding ingredients, processes, industrial practices, and accumulated wisdom of old sots like Amis. He writes that it’s best to keep seltzer or sparkling water outside the fridge, as refrigeration kills the bubbles. Why isn’t Jack Daniel’s technically considered a bourbon? (Because it’s made in Tennessee, not in Bourbon County, Kentucky.) What do (or did) winemakers in Bordeaux do in poor harvest years? (Import grapes from Rioja, a region in Spain that’s a major producer of red wines, particularly from the Tempranillo grape.) And he won points with me with several mentions of Tokaj azsu, the sweet wines of Hungary made from grapes affected with the “noble rot” fungus.

He also includes numerous drink recipes, including a few of his own making, one of which is, in fact, named “The Lucky Jim,” a dry martini with cucumber juice. I’ll trust one of you to give that a shot and report back to me.

Next book: Hangover Square, a novel by Patrick Hamilton, author of Rope, a play that became one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more famous films.

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