What Einstein Told His Cook (29 page)

Looking at some freshly stripped bark, I was pleased to learn one thing that I had always wondered about: Is the bark really thick enough for the length of a wine cork? Yes, after nine years it is. The corks are punched out perpendicularly through the flattened sheets of bark like cutting tall, narrow cookies.

Throughout the hundreds of years that cork has been used to stopper wine bottles, there has been a nagging problem. Known as cork taint or wine taint, it is a musty smell from a mold that afflicts a small percentage of corks and affects the taste of the wine. Quality control in modern wineries, especially in the large ones, has lowered the chances that your bottle will be “corked” or “corky” to somewhere between 2 and 8 percent. Nevertheless, replacing the cork with a synthetic plastic is an attractive alternative, because mold won’t grow on plastic.

Here’s how the taint arises.

During the stripping, sorting, storage, and processing of the bark, there are many opportunities for molds to grow on it. The finished corks are usually treated with a chlorine solution to disinfect and bleach them. The chlorine doesn’t succeed in killing all the mold, however, and it has the side effect of producing chemicals called chlorophenols from natural phenolics in the cork. The surviving molds, plus others that join them during long ocean voyages from Portugal to California, for example, are able to convert some of these chlorophenols into a powerfully odoriferous chemical called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, mercifully nicknamed TCA. It’s the TCA that makes wines taste and smell corky. It can be detected in concentrations of a few parts per trillion.

Plastic “corks” (synthetic closures, in the trade lingo) are now used to varying degrees by more than two hundred wineries worldwide. Companies such as Neocork and Nomacorc are turning out extruded polyethylene stoppers by the millions, while SupremeCorq makes its plastic stoppers by a molding process and takes the prize for creative spelling.

How do the synthetics compare with real corks? They seem to pass the tests for leakage, exclusion of oxygen, and printability—a requirement because many wineries use printing on the cork to carry marketing messages. But because the synthetic closures haven’t been around long enough for long-term aging studies, most wineries are using them for wines that are meant to be drunk young—within, say, six months of bottling, although Neocork says that its closures will hold up for as long as eighteen months.

But when connoisseurs pay more than a hundred dollars for a bottle of top-quality wine, they generally don’t want to see any new-fangled gimmicks. In an attempt to defuse any snobbishness, some wineries have been introducing plastic stoppers and even—would you believe?—screw-top closures on some of their top-of-the-line products. After all, an aluminum cap is probably the ideal closure; it’s airtight, never gets moldy, and can be removed without any tools.

What next? Mouton-Rothschild in a box?

THE NOSE KNOWS

In a restaurant, when the waiter opens the wine and places the cork on the table, what am I supposed to do with it?

Y
ou’re not expected to sniff it for evidence of moldiness. That’s rare in this day and age. Moreover, when a small amount of the wine is poured for monsieur or madame’s approval, a couple of swirls and sniffs will tell all that one needs to know. If the wine smells and tastes fine, who cares what the cork smells like?

If you have an unquenchable urge to sniff something, sniff the glass before the wine is poured. If it smells like disinfectant or soap or anything else, for that matter—clean glass has no odor—ask for another glass, that is, unless you’ve ordered a bottle of plonk, in which case a little soap might be an improvement.

You might, however, glance casually at the cork to see if it is wet (and stained, if it’s a red wine) partway up. That means that the bottle has been properly stored on its side, with the cork being constantly wet for a tight seal.

Historically, a restaurateur’s presentation of the cork to the patron was for an entirely different reason than sniffing for taint. It’s a practice that began in the nineteenth century when unscrupulous merchants developed the habit of passing off cheap wines as expensive ones. Wine producers began to combat this practice by printing their names on the corks to prove authenticity. And, of course, the bottle was and still is always opened in the patron’s presence.

Today, rather than risk insulting a good restaurant by either sniffing the cork or putting on your reading glasses to scrutinize it, the best advice is just to ignore it. I like to fiddle with it during the breaks between courses, when in olden times I used to light a cigarette.

SAY WHEN!

I keep reading that moderate alcohol consumption can be a benefit to heart health. But what, exactly, is “moderate consumption”?

T
he usual evasive answer to this question is “one or two drinks a day.” But what is “a drink,” anyway? A bottle of beer? A glass of wine? A brimful, six-ounce martini? There are tall drinks and short drinks, stiff drinks and weak drinks. One man’s drink may look to the next guy like a thimbleful or a bucketful.

At home, if you’re in the habit of splashing scotch into your glass without measuring, the splash tends to grow bigger and bigger as the years go by. In a restaurant, how much alcohol is that bartender really giving you when he’s being either generous or stingy? In short, how much actual alcohol is there in “a drink?”

That’s the question that has been on everybody’s mind—well, mine, anyway—ever since the USDA came out with its latest “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” (fifth edition, 2000; it is revised every five years). I intend to answer that burning question right here and now.

But first, as they say on the radio, this message.

After warning that excessive drinking can lead to accidents, violence, suicide, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, malnutrition, birth defects, and damage to the liver, pancreas, brain, and heart (whew!), the USDA guidelines state plainly that “drinking in moderation may lower risk for coronary heart disease, mainly among men over age forty-five and women over age fifty-five.”

(But hey, you college kids: It also states that “moderate consumption provides little, if any, health benefit for younger people.” In fact, it adds, “Risk of alcohol abuse increases when drinking starts at an early age.”)

At virtually the same time, a Harvard University epidemiological study published in the July 6, 2000,
New England Journal of Medicine
reported that after following 84,129 women from 1980 to 1994, those who drank moderately were found to have a 40 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those who didn’t drink at all. For more than ten years now, similar research findings have been making headlines. The conclusion seems clear that, as the authors of the Harvard study put it, “moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease” in both men and women.

Moderate alcohol consumption? Excessive drinking? What do these terms mean?

In an attempt to be helpful to the man and woman in the street—or in the bar—the USDA report boils “moderate consumption” down to “no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men.” The difference has nothing to do with machismo, but is due to sex differences in weight and metabolism.

But that still doesn’t help if “a drink” can mean anything you want it to mean. The medical researchers, good scientists that they are, invariably speak not in terms of “drinks” but in terms of the number of grams of alcohol, which of course is the only thing that counts. Various research studies have defined moderate consumption—that single drink per day for women—as anywhere from 12 to 15 grams of alcohol. (It’s fun to note that a “standard drink” in other countries varies from 8 grams of alcohol in Britain to 20 grams in Japan.) Twelve to 15 grams is roughly the amount of alcohol in 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits. But just try asking bartenders for a drink that contains 15 grams of alcohol. They’ll think you’ve had too many grams already.

The million-dollar question, then, is this: How can you know how many grams of alcohol you’re getting in your “one or two drinks”?

It’s really simple. To find the number of grams of alcohol in your drink, all you have to do is multiply the number of fluid ounces of alcoholic beverage by its percentage of alcohol by volume (which in distilled spirits is one-half the “proof”), then multiply by the number of milliliters in a fluid ounce and by the density of ethyl alcohol in grams per milliliter, and divide the result by 100.

Okay, okay, I’ve done the arithmetic for you. Here’s the formula:
To find the number of grams of alcohol in a drink, multiply the number of ounces by the percentage of alcohol, and then multiply the result by 0.23.

Example: 1.5 ounces of 80-proof (40 percent alcohol) gin, vodka, or whiskey contains 1.5 × 40 × 0.23 × 14 grams of alcohol.

For wine drinkers: Five ounces of a 13 percent wine contains 5 × 13 × 0.23 × 15 grams of alcohol.

Beer hounds: A 12-ounce bottle of 4 percent beer contains 12 × 4 × 0.23 × 11 grams of alcohol.

But you can’t count on those “typical” percentages of alcohol. Although most distilled spirits are standardized at 80 proof or 40 percent alcohol by volume, there are several 90-to 100-proof liquors out there. Wines can vary anywhere from 7 to 24 percent (for fortified wines) and beers can vary from around 3 to 9 or 10 percent (for so-called malt liquors). At home, read the labels and measure your drinks accordingly. At a restaurant or bar, the bartender should always be able to tell you the size of the pour and the percentage of alcohol in the beverage. Complicated mixed drinks can be anyone’s guess.

Putting it all together: If you are in good health and choose to drink, calculate your daily intake of alcohol and limit it to about 15 grams if you’re a woman and 30 grams if you’re a man.

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

Sometimes the label on a bottle of beer tells me the percentage of alcohol in it and sometimes it doesn’t. Isn’t there some law about that?

I
t used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that’s not true anymore.

In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling of beers’ alcohol potencies for fear of “strength wars” breaking out among competitive brewers. Ironically, some sixty years later when light beers and low-alcohol beers were becoming popular, brewers wanted the right to brag about how
little
alcohol their products contained, and they challenged the “no tell” law. In 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the labeling ban violated the First Amendment by interfering with the brewers’ right to free speech.