Peynaud on Scientific Advances

“The faster the scientific advances, the greater the risk of widening the gap between what we know and what we do.”

- Emile Peynaud, 1984

Emile Peynaud was one of the winemaking and winetasting and winethinking geniuses of modern times and is my own wine guru. His books, translated from the French, on The Taste of Wine and Knowing and Making Wine were a major factor in my realizing that wine was far more than just a pleasant evening beverage.

As science advances, practice lags behind. If this was true in Peynaud’s day, how much more true is it today? But is it a problem? Science takes time to be communicated – a sort of “trickle-down” effect from the scientists to the practitioners — and more time to be accepted. Along the way, the science is sometimes resolved, refuted, refined, or even revoked. Should we really jump onto yesterday’s new finding before it has had time to sit around and age a bit?

Violet wine

“Although there are almost innumerable shade of differences in the colour of wine, they are all variety of two, the reddish and the yellowish color. I say reddish, for we know no kind of wine that is actually red or yellow. What we call red in wine is violet, mixture of red and blue. We do not in chemistry speak of the reddish wine as red, but designate its hue by the term wine-colour.”

- from G.J. Mulder’s Chemistry of Wine, 1857, London. p198

Sometimes, generalization for the sake of simplicity is worthwhile. Inaccuracies on the scale of generalizations can make communication so much easier. Can you imagine how Mulder might have asked one of his chemist friends what sort of wine he would like with his roast chicken?