Lactose, Lactic acid, Lactase, or the Lac(k) Thereof (and why wine is still okay)

 Some time ago, an inquisitive mind inquired of me as to whether being lactose intolerant could affect the sufferer’s tolerance of wine that has undergone malolactic fermentation. Fair question. “Lactose” and “lactic” are obviously related, and thinking about an intolerance to the “lactic” in wine is a sensible leap with everyone and their brother speculating over what causes wine headaches and the like (derivatory of the overarching food intolerance fad, I expect.)

 The good and the bad news is that lactose intolerance has no bearing whatsoever on the ability to digest malolactically-fermented wine. Good news, as the lactose-intolerant among us can drink wine without reservation. Bad news, as the lactose-intolerant among us are equally as enlightened as everyone else as far as identifying a cause of the wily wine headache, i.e. still in the dark.

 Short answer: lactose intolerance is unrelated to the ability to tolerate wine that has undergone malolactic fermentation.

Longer answer: Most people who react poorly to lactose suffer from an intolerance, not an allergy. Allergies are inappropriate immune responses to specific epitopes, which can be thought of as molecular shapes. An intolerance, on the other hand, isn’t necessarily an immune response. Lactose intolerance is caused by a deficiency in the enzyme responsible for breaking down lactose in the small intestine. Since we can only absorb lactose after it has been broken down into its component parts – glucose and galactose – a lactase deficiency means that undigested lactose builds up in the intestines to cause bloating, diarrhea, gas, and other discomforts. Unlike lactose, lactic acid can be absorbed without first being acted upon by the lactase enzyme.

Incidentally, even if lactic acid absorption was somehow related to lactose absorption, quantity would be a pertinent consideration. Milk contains 2-8% lactose, i.e. relatively a whole lot, while wine contains much less than 1% lactic acid.

In conclusion, then, the lactic acid in wine should be of no concern to most people who need to avoid lactose. A glass of wine makes a far friendlier companion to a good dinner than a glass of milk, don’t you think?

Does Mommyjuice become babyjuice?

All of this claptrap about “Mommyjuice” had me wondering: to what extent does Mommyjuice become babyjuice? That is, how much alcohol is translated into the breastmilk of lactating women who imbibe? I could tear through pages of search results on PubMed, or I could trust the La Leche League and the American Academy of Pediatricians to have done that work already. Nothing substitutes for a primary literature review but, well…a girl has to allocate limited resources somehow. Keeping with their respective personalities (organazationalities?), the AAP is very conservative, LLL more reasonable. Ooops…I mean more restrictive.

From The American Academy of Physicians policy statement on “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk” (and for what else besides breastfeeding are we inclined to use human milk, dare I ask?) last revised in 2005:

“Breastfeeding mothers should avoid the use of alcoholic beverages,because alcohol is concentrated in breast milk and its use caninhibit milk production. An occasional celebratory single, small alcoholic drink is acceptable, but breastfeeding should be avoidedfor 2 hours after the drink.”

If I wanted to be punchy, I’d take note that that occasional AAP-sanctioned drink needs to be celebratory. Maybe consolatory or commiserating drinks inherently carry greater health risks?

La Leche League FAQs, last revised in 2008, go into a bit more detail. Acknowledging that “breastfeeding mothers receive conflicting advice about whether alcohol consumption can have an effect on their baby,” the general gist of the article is that alcohol consumption in moderation is just fine. Their research agrees that alcohol passes into breastmilk and, furthermore, that alcohol in breastmilk has deleterious effects on infants — “drowsiness, deep sleep, weakness, and decreased linear growth” (big surprise!) but that alcohol concentrations in breastmilk are inconsequential after 2-3 hours. The bottom line? “Adult metabolism of alcohol is approximately 1 ounce in 3 hours, so mothers who ingest alcohol in moderate amounts can generally return to breastfeeding as soon as they feel neurologically normal. Chronic or heavy consumers of alcohol should not breastfeed.” Good commonsense rules the day once again.

I’m not one to extrapolate from the specific to the general, but I can’t let this topic pass without mention of a family yarn that has firmly rooted in the Szymanski Book of Classic Stories. My mother drank — moderately, I’m sure — while breastfeeding me, under the guidance of her (good Eastern European, I believe) pediatrician. The good doctor even advised that the iron and B-vitamins in dark beer might be beneficial for a breastfeeding woman. My Irish-German mother was happy to follow his advice with a pint of Guinness once or twice a week. When I took a liking to Guinness at an unusually early age, then, my parents concluded that a touch of Guinness-flavored breastmilk might have had something to do with my acquistion of that acquired taste.

 Anectodatal to be sure. But, should I ever find myself breastfeeding an infant of my own, I might partake of a weekly glass of Oregon pinot noir just in case.

Ergo, “mommyjuice” does become babyjuice to some extent, but ’tisn’t necessarily a bad thing if mommy doesn’t hit that juice bottle too often.

Does Chardonnay smell?

I’ve recently begun sharing evening meals – and, therefore, wine – with someone with a self-described smell impairment. He isn’t quite anosmic – he can pick out eau du dead skunk in the middle of the road – but the dense aroma of caramelizing onions that suffused my apartment the other evening totally escaped him.

Understanding that the vast majority of his wine-related sensory experience involves his tongue, not his nose, makes his impressions fascinating. Much of what we commonly experience as “taste” is actually smell. This is especially transparent in wine tasting: just try tasting the same wine out of a Dixie cup with your nose pinched and then out of an expansive glass that allows for lots of swirling and focuses volatiles towards your nose.

Often, in tasting a wine, I haven’t an axe-murderer’s chance in heaven of teasing out what is smell and what is pure taste. But now my smell-impaired friend and I can play “do you taste what I taste?” If my friend’s answer is yes, I’ll put my bets on it being a true flavor. If no, my perception is most likely my nose’s doing.

He picked up on the sour, dirty socky-ness of TCA in a “corked” wine. He tasted the bright cherries and raspberries in a well-aged Finger Lakes Merlot, though the overlay of thyme and bay that delighted me escaped him. Tobacco in a Walla Walla (Washington) Syrah is usually a no. Chocolate in the same Syrah is a toss-up. He gets the spice of Hungarian oak and the red bell pepper of pyrazines. In general, fruit comes across more than herbs or vegetation or flowers and, in general, reds are easier than whites. 

The Chardonnay that accompanied this evening’s roast chicken (with Meyer lemon, caramelized onions, and parsley) over spaghetti squash (with Parmesan and feta cheeses), steam-sautéed crucifers (with currants and Aleppo pepper), and a bit of mango-radish salad is an excellent case-in-point. To me, the Folie à Deux 2009 Napa Valley Chardonnay was exemplary of its type. Melon, oak, and vanilla on the nose. Lemon, butter, and vanilla on the palate. Sharp acidity up front on the tongue balanced by some perceptible residual sugar (the main point at which this wine deviates from the classic California oaky Chard profile.) Long finish dominated by butter and oak. Yummy, if a little on the sweet-tart side for my taste. 

His redux: acidity and sugar, yes; lemon, yes; vanilla, no; melon, no. Oak and butter, sort of, if you allow his amalgamating those flavors into “rum.”

I’m now hypothesizing that some wines – like Chardonnay – owe a higher proportion of their character to aroma than others – like, say, Carménère (which my companion tends to enjoy a lot.) Hypotheses require testing to be bolstered up or smashed down, and post-hoc analysis just won’t do since I haven’t heretofore paid attention to the right factors in the right way. Awwww, shucks. We’ll just need to drink – and talk about – more wine.

Folie à Deux 2009 Napa Valley Chardonnay – $18 (media sample)

If I had a million dollars…

If I had a million dollars…

…I would stock my cellar with a few cases of higher-end Oregon pinot noir — and at least three representatives from every major winemaking region in France (and perhaps Italy and Spain, too) just for educational purposes — and buy myself a UC Davis degree before investing the rest in agricultural microcredit.

On a less serious note, a reasonable alternative might be starting my own company at the intersection of the great intellectual loves of my life: wine, microbology, and medicine (if I could work music history and medival culinary practices into the mix, too, I would.)  My flagship product? The wine headache dipstick.

Lest you get the wrong idea, the wine headache dipstick is not the young man at your local eating establishment who repeatedly fills your wine glass to the rim and leaves you with a wine-related headache that has nothing to do with the wine itself, properly. I’m also not referring to an ear probe that diagnoses a wine headache and documents the magnitude of its severity for employer sick-day verification, for example.

What I have in mind is a tool that would instantly let the susceptible individual know if the glass of wine before her is likely to induce a headache or other unpleasant reaction.

The etiology of the “wine headache” remains something of a mystery (for an excellent discussion of some of the possibilities, see my fellow Palate Press science wise guy Tom Mansell’s article here.) While we’ve not yet one single, pat explanation, one of the more probable invokes a reaction to biogenic amines present in some wines. Biogenic amines – histamine, tyrosine, and putriscine, to name a few – are a product of the metabolism of nitrogen-containing compounds – amino acids – by malolactic and spoilage bacteria. Brettanomyces in particular tends to send biogenic amine levels sky-high, and other wines may owe their b.a. counts to the bacteria that performed malolactic conversion. Reds more than whites, then, tend to have this problem.

And why are biogenic amines a problem? In some people they cause headaches; in others, nausea, in others, a panoply of other assorted allergy-ish symptoms. In me, they provoke what my colleagues sometimes call the “thermometer” effect: I turn bright red, and the brighter red I turn, the more biogenic amines are in the wine. A headache comes along with the color change, too, and I’m left feeling a bit woozy even if I’ve only had one glass. I’m sure that I’m not the only one.

Molecular biology has produced diagnostic tests for everything, it seems, both in the clinic and in the lab. We have pre-loaded, multi-compartment test tubes that identify bacterial samples based on metabolic profile. We have indicator strips that will detect the presence of certain compounds in urine. Why couldn’t we have an indicator strip – a little paper dipstick – that detects the presence of biogenic amines in wine?

Testing every bottle is sure to be overkill – expensive overkill – for most people most of the time. But imagine someone who doesn’t drink wine very often and who reacts very severely to biogenic amines, but who enjoys drinking wine with friends from time to time. Imagine someone who drinks wine often but only wants to ensure that wines are biogenic amine-free on special occasions when turning bright red or having a headache would be compromising or inconvenient: an interview or a date, for example. Imagine someone who is teased when she complains about wine headaches and would appreciate scientific evidence correlating her bad reactions with a chemical wine fault.

I’m sure that my imagined “Wine Headache Indicator Strips” would be prohibitively expensive for daily use but, heck, I’d buy them. On those days when I really, really don’t want to deal with the after-effects of biogenic amines and the glass before me is suspect, I’ll discreetly pull a small case from my purse, pull out a strip, and pull my glass towards me to touch the strip to the liquid therein (perhaps while my companions are distracted.) If the strip turns orange, I’ll happily imbibe. If the strip turns deep chestnut brown, I’ll take one very small sip, play with the glass a bit, and drink lots of water.

If I had a million dollars, I’d invent such a thing. Since I don’t have a million dollars, does anyone else want to take me up on the challenge?

Wait; What Century is This? A response to “The Daily Sip”

This morning, The Daily Sip ran an installment entitled “She Gets 100 Points” about Sophie Parker, a young woman wine critic from New Zealand. The tag line reads “If Robert Parker looked like this, we’d pay more attention,” and it’s made perfectly clear that those 100 points refer to the 22 year-old, blonde’s feminine charms, not her writing. The Daily Sip (TDS) is the trademarked daily e-newsletter of Bottlenotes, “the premier online wine community,” with over 175,000 subscribers according to its advertising page.

Wait; what century is this? Haven’t we, as a wine community, moved past this? I’m not talking about using attractive, scantily-clad women (and men) in wine advertising – heck, sex sells cars and toothpaste, too – but explicitly rating a woman wine critic on her looks? Really?

Eric Arnold from TDS responded to my outraged comment that “that’s merely the introduction, meant to be humorous. Having spoken at length with Ms. Parker, we’re confident that she’s not offended. Furthermore, you should read the full interview, which shows unequivocally we paid attention only to her work, not her appearance.” Having read the full interview prior to making my original comment, I naturally realized that the focus was indeed on Ms. Parker’s wine reviews. But does that justify the introduction? The title and leading paragraph are what TDS uses to promote reader “click through” to their main site. By focusing that lead on Ms. Parker’s looks, TDS is implicitly telling its readers: “We’d like to tell you about this young woman’s professional interests, but we think that the best way to get you interested, to hook you and pull you in to the rest of the content, is with her physical attributes.”

Even if Ms. Parker isn’t offended by this approach, I am offended as a reader. Furthermore, this kind of lead is naturally going to inspire a disproportionately high click-through rate from readers who are principally interested in Ms. Parker for the wrong reasons. And what of those readers who receive TDS’s emails but don’t bother to read the interview? That substantial readership segment has now been given entirely the wrong ideas by a very heavily skewed leading paragraph. As Ms. Parker proceeds forward with her career, this is the kind of attention that she’ll do best to avoid. A few of the comments following the interview sarcastically asked if wine reviewers need to be old and ugly to be taken seriously. Let’s not be absurd. Jancis Robinson, Andrea Immer Robinson, Meg Houston Maker (emeritus editor of Palate Press), Sarah Chappell (a Palate Press contributing editor and manager of a Manhattan-based wine company)…the list is too long to continue even if I leave out the many young men in the wine world who should never be called “old and ugly.”

Am I overreacting? Maybe, but this is an excellent excuse to point out how far we’ve come, and to show exactly how far from the norm TDS places itself. The books Women of Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry (A.B. Matasar, University of California Press) and Women of the Vine: Inside the World of Women who Make, Taste, and Enjoy Wine (D. Brenner, John Wiley and Sons, Inc.), written in 2006 and 2007 respectively, had no lack of material on which to draw. Today, women winemakers are so commonplace that their gender is hardly even remarked upon. Gina Gallo, Merry Edwards, Heidi Peterson Barrett, Helen Turley, Sarah Marquis, Elisabetta Gippetti, Amelia Ceja, Claire Villars…again, it would be ridiculous to continue.

So, to those at TDS: I appreciate your jocular approach and your desire for humor, but you can do better than this. Any journalist worthy of the name can come up with more than one lead for a feature, and anyone worthy of a feature is worthy of fair representation. Ms. Parker is worthy of more respect than this, and so is your readership. You can do better than this but, until you do, TDS, you’re on my black list.

Am I alone in thinking this is inappropriate? Let me know what you think.

Word of the Day: Delestage (and 2008 Folie a Deux Napa Valley Merlot)

Délestage – (‘dehl-luh-STAJ’) aka “rack and return” (though the French sounds much more refined and romantic, as usual.) Refers to the practice of repeatedly draining fermenting red wine off of its skins through a screen that traps some portion of the seeds, then returning the drained-off juice to continue fermenting on the skins, but minus the seeds entrapped in the draining process. Fewer seeds = lower seed-to-juice ratio = less extraction of seed tannins into juice = less tannic wine.

You know that it can’t really be that simple. There are two reasons why just describing the mechanics of the operation is inadequate. First, the “rack and return” process does more than just remove seeds. Like other methods of cap management*, the process also douses the floating grape skins. Unlike some other methods of cap management, délestage generally incorporates a lot of air into the must when the juice is pumped back over the skins.

Besides stimulating their growth, oxygen discourages fermentation yeasts from producing unsavory cooked cabbage and onion-like sulfides. Oxygen also has far-reaching and often poorly-understood effects on myriad elements of wine chemistry. Tannin polymerization, for example, is influenced by oxygen in complex ways that seem, in general, to lead to softer and rounder wines In fact, the role of oxygen in winemaking is so very complex that I’m going to refrain from saying any more about it here for fear of perjuring myself. In any case, the influence of délestage on a wine can’t just be attributed to removing seeds; oxygen must play a part, too.

The second reason why délestage is more complex than its mechanical description comes from our understanding – or, rather, our lack of understanding – of tannins themselves. We once separated tannins into the two broad categories of seed tannins and skin tannins. Seed tannins were bad: harsh, bitter, and green. Skin tannins were better: softer and malleable. In this context, délestage makes a lot of sense. Decreased exposure to bitter seeds during fermentation should reduce harsh, bitter flavors.

For better or for worse, tannin chemists, led by Dr. Jim Harbertson at WSU, have shattered this simplistic understanding. Tannins are polymers of flavon-3-ols. According to Harbertson’s work, longer tannins are usually perceived as more astringent, yet seed tannins are about a third of the length of skin tannins, averaging ten instead of thirty units. On the other hand, seed tannins take longer to extract than skin tannins; even though seed tannins outweigh skin tannins in magnitude, they release more slowly. To add yet another layer of complexity, the make-up of each tannin polymer influences its sensory characteristics in addition to its sheer length. And even then tannin experts haven’t yet deciphered what happens to tannins over time to make well-aged wine seem softer and less harsh than its youthful counterpart. For more on this topic without delving into the scientific literature, try this palatable Wines and Vines article.

The upshot of how to use délestage in the face of all of this complex chemistry? Taste, taste, taste. I’m no winemaker, but isn’t this self-evident? Superb winemakers have been making superb wine for centuries before anyone ever named or knew of a flavon-3-ol. Intuitively, it makes sense that removing seeds will reduce seed-y flavors. If that makes your wine taste better, go for it. As for oxygen, even if it remains the great unknown variable, scientific uncertainty doesn’t invalidate your taste buds.

*Cap management – grape skins are pushed, parachute-like, to the top of the must by CO₂ bubbles created by the fermentation process, creating a “cap” of skins that can literally float above the surface of the must. Free from the protective effects of alcohol and acid and exposed to air, this cap will rapidly submit to spoilage microorganisms if not frequently reincorporated into the must. Hence, in making red wines, the “cap” must be “managed.” 

The fact sheets for these wines state that it they were “fermented using the Délestage method.” Without tasting the délestage and non-délestage samples side-by-side, I can’t help but think part of the benefit of using “rack and return” is being able to incorporate the word “délestage” into promotional materials.

 2008 Folie à Deux Napa Valley Merlot ($18 on the winery website) – Purple-tinged garnet red. Fairly monochrome but very pleasant sweet cherry nose, releasing a bit of cinnamon and clove heat over a few sniffs. Assertive Maraschino cherry hit up front – warm, round, and sweet – made less cloying by overtones of baking spices. A bit alcoholic on the finish with very spare tannins. Pleasant fruit flavors overall, but just a bit too much heat and alcohol for its own shoes.

Folie à Deux Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($24 on the winery website) – Looks like cranberry juice and smells a bit like cranberry juice, too: bright, astringent, simultaneously fruity and herbaceous. Full, sweet, black raspberry and cherry jam fruit is satisfyingly mouth-filling and sweet before disappearing into an acidic, refreshing finish (again, not unlike cranberry juice.) More tannin in the nose than on the palate with a smooth and fairly light aspect overall. Definitely not a big, chewy, rich, cabernet, but very tasty for a light-weight.

A little goat cheese with your wine?

To say that something tastes “goaty,” in common parlance, is to say that it tastes like goat milk or cheese. I suppose that English-speakers are, in general, more familiar with goat-derived dairy products than they are with goat meat. Too, goat milk is so distinctively flavored that its presence screams through anything to which it is added. Regardless, wine isn’t usually goaty. Usually.

Goaty flavors are apparently related to three fatty acids, the “goaty acids,” C6 (caproic acid), C8, (caprylic acid), and C10 (capric acid.) [NB: incidentally, the Latin name for “goat” is Capra.] These acids collectively comprise 15% of the fats in goat milk (thank you, Wikipedia.) All three have been found in wine. A wine that smells and/or tastes like goat, therefore, probably contains unusually high amounts of these acids.

Why do I mention all of this? By now, you may have guessed – correctly – that I have recently encountered a goaty wine.

The goaty acids are found in grapes and can be produced by both wine-related yeast and bacteria. What I’ve been trying for the past week to learn is what affects the amount of these acids produced by each source. Medium-chained fatty acids (MCFAs), including the goaty C6, C8, and C10, are antimicrobial, inhibit the growth and reduce the rate of growth of both yeast and malolactic bacteria, and are related to stuck fermentations.

MCFAs can slide into the phospholipid bilayer that ordinarily seals the interior of the cell off from its environment. When this happens, the permeability of the membrane increases; in other words, the cell springs a leak (or, rather, many tiny leaks.) This is, needless to say, dangerous.

The research published on wine microorganisms and MCFAs is vast. Synthesizing all of the primary data is more like the subject of a solid literature review for the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, not a blog post. Still, I’ve read enough to fairly conclude that the matrix of MCFA production by and influence on microbes and grape vines remains something of a mystery.

None of this helps me understand why a particular Finger Lakes wine tastes like goat. Or, more particularly, why several wines from a particular Finger Lakes winery taste like goat. Sheldrake Point was new ground for me on my most recent visit to my old wine-tasting grounds in upstate New York. Though I now live within easy driving distance of the wine-rich pastures of eastern Washington, my parents are still close enough to the Finger Lakes to be practical. A Christmas visit afforded an excellent chance to get up to the lakes, revisit several old favorites, and explore a new winery or two. We detoured from the eastern border of Seneca lake to the western side of Cayuga lake and Sheldrake Point on the advice of a Seneca winery tasting room manager. I’m glad we did. None of the wines was remarkable – consistently okay, but not great – but either the terroir of Cayuga lake is dramatically different than Seneca or else Sheldrake Point has a style all its own. “Goat cheese” was a common thread not only through the whites but also into the pinot noir, as was a lightness that stood out even among the typically light-bodied wines of upstate New York.

A few interesting notes about Sheldrake. First, it seems that they do enjoy an unusual mesoclimate. Like the rest of the Finger Lakes, they enjoy the temperature- and humidity-buffering effects of a deep neighboring body of water. Unlike most of the regions’ wineries, however, their vineyards come down nearly to waters’ edge. Their grapes also bed down on the remains of an old cattle ranch. Could that have something to do with those unusual flavors? Finally, I should point out that my impressions were far from normal: Sheldrake Point’s 2008 Late Harvest Riesling took “Best Sweet Riesling in the World” and “Best American Riesling” at Australia’s 2010 Canberra International Riesling Festival and the winery has been named “Winery of the Year” for two years running by Wine and Spirits Magazine and the New York Wine and Food Classic. Heck, maybe I’m weird.

2008 Waterfall Chardonnay ($12) – All stainless. Strong aroma of goat cheese, along with lemon and cherimoya. Flavor is very light and crisp, dominated again by goat cheese and lemon flavors, and surprisingly creamy. Tidy, longish finish.

 2008 Barrel Reserve Chardonnay ($18) – Prominent, yet not intense barrel-colored aroma: lemon, vanilla, and oak, plus the same goat cheese note as in the Waterfall. A bit thin on the palate, a bit too much lemon-juice acidity in the mid-section, and a bit oak-heavy on the finish. Not bad, but not balanced.

2008 Gamay noir ($16) – Light, bright strawberry aroma, backed up by a mouthful of strawberry-lemon Jello. Virtually a rose and styled like an old-fashioned pink picnic wine with a bit of sweetness on the finish. If I hadn’t been told otherwise, I would have guessed at carbonic maceration.

2008 Pinot Noir ($16) – Pale tawny peach color, very unusual for a pinot, and suggesting oxidation. Smells strongly of goat cheese and tastes strongly of dried sweet cherries. Very acidic finish with essentially imperceptible tannins.

2007 Pinot Noir Reserve ($25) – Very different in style from the 2008 Pinot, with perceptible oak in the nose and on the palate. Exploding raspberries in the mouth, but with an oaky/smoky rather than acidic/fruity finish. Much less goat cheese.