Insanity of the wine industry

On Mon, 05 Apr 2004 15:10:17 GMT, "Vincent Vega" (a french company) wrote in two subsequent paragraphs :

of the two-faced French.

I think I will spend no more time on Mr. Vega's trollisms.

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Do you call everyone who disagrees with your "expertise" a troll? This is the problem with todays wine culture. It is so closed minded it cant handle even the most basic criticisms. Its the blind leading the blind.

example of the two-faced French.

Sorry, I cannot read your post, as I am blind.

But I can hear you, and you are getting troller by the minute.

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Vincent, I am not going to argue your points either direction...just one point on Sulfites.

When I was in France and asked at numerous wineries I was informed that sulfites naturally appear in most grapes. They are not added. I asked the same question in California and the same was stated.

I don't get your point on this.

When I say that I find many a french wine superior to California/Oregon I am typically making reference to that fact that in most decent years I find that French wines tend to be more complex, more ageworthy, longer living and longer for aging gracefully.

I especially find that to be true of Burgs. Bordeaux most of the classified growths.

As for Sulfites I consider that argument to be pointless. If you ask if Sulfites are added vs. do wines contain sulfites I think the answer could differ.

I am one that knows little about wine and therefore consider myself a novice after 25 years of making a a life passion. I am not a winemaker...just and enthusiast.

Would a wine snob know how to spell "champaign"? Would a wine snob know that "champaign" can't be made in Pennsylvania? Would a wine snob be able to name the maker of this "champaign" and the "award show" and international competition where this alledgedly took place? Troll? I think so. Bi!!

a very small residual of sulfites remain in wine due to the process of fermentation. (less than 10 parts per million). If a winery in France or in Cali tell you that they dont add sulphites, in 99.99% of the cases,, they would be lying to you. A simple way to verify this is to see if the US label says "contains sulphites". In the USA, if a wine contains more than

10ppm free SO2 than it has to be tagged "contains sulphites". Rarely will you have a finished wine that contains more than 10ppm from naturally occuring sulphites. You can then assume that wines tagged "contains sulphites" have sulphites added during processing or botteling by the winemaker. In France, this law does not exist so the French simply tell their customers that they dont add sulphits. After all, this is what the customer wants to hear.

Unless a winery is going after the trendy, yup-yup organic crowed they would definatly add sulphites. Any winemaker who cares about the quality and the longevity of his wines will add sulphites. The additions are crucial to quality winemaking by todays standards.

In my opinion west coast wines have exceeded the quality of French bordeaux. but who cares? I have my taste and you have yours. At no time was I ever debating US vs French wines, so I dont understand the relevance of your comment to this thread.

The answer to "are sulfites are added" is yes in 99.999% of wineries.

And I fully admint that I know very little about the names and vintages and wineries of the world. I am sure most people in this forum know more about these things than I do. I do however have a good comprehension of winemaking and wine chemistry. Enough so, that I am perplexed by some of the things that "wine enthusiast" say.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

champagne

\Cham*pagne"\, n. [F. See Champaign.] A light wine, of several kinds, originally made in the province of Champagne, in France.

Note: Champagne properly includes several kinds not only of sparkling but of still wines; but in America the term is usually restricted to wines which effervesce.

Only a wine snob thinks champaign can only be made in France.

I might point out that while I'm sure Vincent Vega isn't a totally uncommon name, it does happen to be the name of the John Travolta character in "Pulp Fiction". Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

you think this is Travolta?

Salut/Hi Vincent Vega,

le/on Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:58:56 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

And you got what?

While I'm doing what?

No, I didn't miss it, I ignored it.

yes you've said that at least three times. I didn't comment on this, as I think it's ludicrous. What I commented upon was what seemed to me to be false presumptions.

Well, they only way for me to prove I am right is to do some blind wine tasting and unfortunatly we can not do this over the internet. My experience has been that the judging of non-flawed wines is totally inconsistant. For this reason I am fairly convinced that I am correct. You can choose not to believe me, you can choose to believe me or you can do some controlled experimentation for yourself and gather your own empirical data.

Here are some of the sulfides that are natural to the wine process and you can see the ppm are even greater.

hydrogen sulfide H2S rotten egg, sewage-like 0.9-1.5 ethyl mercaptan CH3CH2SH burnt match, sulfidy, earthy 1.1-1.8 methyl mercaptan CH3SH rotten cabbage, burnt rubber 1.5 diethy sulfide CH3CH2SCH2CH3 rubbery 0.9-1.3 dimethyl sulfide CH3SCH3 canned corn, cooked cabbage, asparagus 17-25 diethyl disulfide CH3CH2SSCH2CH3 garlic, burnt rubber 3.6-4.3 dimethyl disulfide CH3SSCH3 vegetal, cabbage, onion-like at high levels

9.8-10.2 carbon disulfide CS2 sweet, ethereal, slightly green, sulfidy 5

Given this much sulfide already there, why would anyone want to add more.

40 years ago when I started drinking wine I was rather poor. The thought of pouring out a wine would never occur to me. I encounter problems with that good old rotten egg smell in some of my burgundies and that veggie smell in some of my Salinas county California wines but being cheap I had to overcome that. Someone told me about the old copper penny trick of getting rid of the smell and then later the silver spoon was even better. Never threw one away for sulfide smell. Bill

"dick" wrote in news:hNjcc.12730$yN6.4732 @newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:

Actually there seem to be 2 Vincent Vegas operating on the usenet right now. One that looks like ours hangs out at uk home built computers and tv areas-I like Ismael and Isaac by the way- while the other is or appears to be Italian.

I am replying way up on the food chain.

1. You can not spell.
2. You can not parse a sentance.
3. You used the word "semantics", but you probalby can not define it.
4. Using just first predicate logic, so far, you know nothing.

Rich

Hang on Vincent,

le/on Mon, 05 Apr 2004 19:51:09 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Dickm I am pretty sure you didn't ask the right question. 99% of french wineries use SO2 or metabisulphites to sterilise. So, technically they don't use _sulphites_, but they use sulphur dioxide or substances releasing it. I've NEVER in all the wineries I visited EVER heard one which claims not to use it (unless they are genuinely not adding it. But I can only think of one case.

True.

Absolutely untrue.

Agreed.

Who?

So that's what you've been trying to say? Once again, tasting is by definition subjective and *should* be determined by personal taste (the alternative, after all, is to blindly parrot what someone else thinks or says). However, that does not make the judging of wine "totally inconsistent" as you said elsewhere. A famous case in point is Steven Spurrier's 1976 blind tasting ("The Judgement of Paris") where the top two wines ('73 SLV Cask 23 and '70 Ch. Montrose) received no score below

10/20 and were scored by virtually all 11 judges in the range of 14-16/20, whereas the bottom two wines in the tasting received no less than 6 scores below 10/20. See this link for details:

Blind tastings, by their very nature, will remove the influence of heresay, reputation, etc. that you cite -- and many serious wine critics conduct only blind tastings. However, we all recognize that it is your own palate that must be the final arbiter of quality. At best, you might find a critic, or fellow taster, or wine merchant, who can fairly reliably predict your reaction to a given wine, thereby assisting your own palate in sifting the wheat from the chaff.

Mark Lipton

Exactly,, I dont see what is trollish or so controversial.

Once again, tasting is by

According to your link, The worst wine was scored higher than the best wine by 3 seperate judges. This only reinforces my point. I once had an HONEST conversation with a winemaker as to how he recieved Gold medals for all of his wines. His secret was to enter every competition he could. "If your wine isnt flawed and you enter enough competitions you are bound to recieve a Gold medal" LOL

The other point I was trying to make that seems to be so controversial is the comment made about Northern California wines about acidity.

SO2 is what is regulated by the government. H2S and the others have non of the same attributes of SO2.

This is another myth. Thanks for pointing it out. I hear alot of winemakers who dont like to admint (for unknown reasons) that they add SO2 directly to their wine so they claim that residual SO2 gets into their wine by using it as a sterilizer. This is even more dubious considering the fact that SO2 is an anti-oxidizing agent and DOES NOT STERILIZE. It is also combined with citric acid and used as a oak barrel treatment where barrel is filled up immediatly after the agent is discarded. When doing this they can still claim that there is no sulfite is added to the wine,, and they are telling the truth,, the wine is added to the sulfites. LOL. I can believe you people claim to be wine experts and you dispute the fact that SO2 is commonly added to ALL quality wines throughout the world. If we cant agree on this FACT then I dont see any any education or enlightenment can occur here.

There is a law in France where sulphites need to be posted on the wine label? Please show me this law so I can correct myself.