Thursday 6 May 2010

"So why isn't Wine one of your 5-a-day?"



Or: An attempt at combining logic and wine.

After last week's throw away comment, that wine is technically juice, I started thinking about why wine isn't considered one of the 5-a-day. Juice is said to be good for you as it contains vitamins and minerals, plant nutrients and phyto-chemicals (the goodness in all 5-a-days which I'm tentatively going to label it Vitamin G, as I've always wanted to).

The basis of this post is that "Juice" counts as one of five, wine is merely fermented grape-juice, egro wine is one of the five. Simple enough argument, it logically follows, the only contentious issue here is whether the points are true, (Stand aside logicians, Philosophy Graduate in action here!), and as its always good to ask, question, and doubt, rather than to shut up and put up I'm going to prove that wine is one of the five. The real crux of the matter is what changes in the wine-making process and whether any of the goodness is lost.

Firstly, fermentation. The grapes arrive at the winery, they're pressed and the juice that runs off is then put into a big vat and left to ferment. Now fermentation as defined by a biochemist is "any reaction involving either living micro-organisms or, at least, an enzyme extracted from such organisms." However that's at bit overspecific as we're only interested in alcoholic fermentation; that wonderful process of turning Sugar, through the action of yeast, into alcohol, with some Carbon Dioxide left over (For all you who missed GCSE chemistry, that's C6H12O6->2C2H5OH+2CO2).
So far so good, all the Vitamin Gs are still there, as all that's changed is the sugar content has been replaced by alcohol (and lots of dead-yeast cells). What we have after fermentation is a cloudy, alcoholic liquid that's got lots of bits in it that will need fining and filtering (Whilst we have cloudy juice on our menus, we haven't quite reached the point as consumers of liking cloudy wine).
Fining was traditionally done with egg whites and bulls' blood, but these days wine-makers more often use more exciting things like Bentonite and Isinglass. More specifically what fining does is pull out of solution things like excess tannins and other colloids (of which all our Vitamin Gs aren't) so that they can be filtered out. The amount of filtration used depends on the wine, whites will be more highly filtered than reds, as we want crystal clear bright white wine, and more over, the more expensive the wine the less it's going to be filtered. As to over filter anything results in a stripping of its quality. Now if you filtered orange juice, you wouldn't loose the potassium content say, nor vitamin C, which as ascorbic acid remains in solution.
So to return to the original hypothesis: Juice is good for you as it contains Vitamin G. Wine is simply fermented grape juice. Thus: Wine is good for you as it contains Vitamin G.

The best use of bad wine
is to drive away poor relations.

Traditional French Proverb

Suggested Wine-style to try this week: Chilean Syrah (since the Chileans have finally reopened their ports and are shipping their lovely wine to the UK again)

I've realised from visiting excellent blogs, such as my friends Ed's and Holly's, that mine was suffering from a distinct lack of pictures. This has now been remedied (yes I know it's not quite work friendly).