NOBEL PHYSICS PRIZE FOR OZ PINOTABLE

NOBEL PRIZEWINNER PROFESSOR BRIAN SCHMIDT FILTERS THE HEAVENS THROUGH HIS MAIPENRAI CANBERRA HILLS PINOT NOIR

One Big Bang Deserves Another
Stargazing Oz Pinotphiliac Wins
Lucrative Vikin Dynamite Gong

by PHILIP WHITE

Hopeless Pinot Noir fanatic, Professor Brian Schmidt of Maipenrai Vineyard and Winery at Sutton, near Canberra, has won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 for his discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovæ.

An Australian citizen who works at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australia National University, the US-born Prof Schmidt shares the award with Professor Saul Perlmutter of The Supernova Cosmology Project, Berkeley, California, and Professor Adam Riess of the High-z Supernova Search Team at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore.

This award comes hard on the heels of Australian Professors Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz last week winning an Ig Nobel prize for their discovery that the male Australian jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli suffers such desperate determination to impregnate brown beer stubbies, that it will ignore lethal ant bites to its exposed penis during its frotting of the bottle.

In making their announcement, administrators of the Nobel Prize said “some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice ... What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year's Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.”

THE INTERGALACTIC ICE BUCKET COMMENCED WITH AN EVEN BIGGER BANG THAN NOBEL'S ... CLICK IMAGE TO VISIT PROFESSOR SCHMIDT'S STAR PAGE ... DRINKSTER BELIEVES THAT EVENTUALLY, THESE PINOT-ADDLED STARGAZERS WILL REALISE THIS ICEBUCKET HAS A LOVELY MOBIUS TWIST UP ITS SIDE, WHICH WILL OBVIOUSLY MAKE THE WHOLE DAMN THING LEAK, AS IT WILL HAVE NO BOTTOM, BUT WILL STILL PLAY GOOD TRUMPET, AND BECOME INFINITELY MORE SLIPPERY, ACCELERATIVE, AND (THIS IS CONSOLING FOR WINEMAKERS) ENDLESS

“When we did that measurement we found something extremely, well, I would say unexpected,” Prof Schmidt told the Sydney Morning Herald last night. “We found the rate at which the cosmos is flying apart is speeding up, rather than slowing down under the pull of gravity. The universe is slowly fading away on us.”

Almost simultæneously, Professor Perlmutter’s group made the same discovery.

The Nobel citation continues “for almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

“The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma - perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.”

There’s delicious irony in the notion that Alfred Nobel (above) made his lucrative prize possible with the millions he made from his invention of dynamite. Julodimorpha bakewelli aside, one big bang deserves another.

While both beer and dumb beetles and the lot of us will end up on ice, Prof Schmidt is intent on making the most of the not-yet-freezing-but-pretty-cool climate of the Canberra hills to produce the best Pinot noir he can.

“All of our wines are made using artisan practices,” he writes on his website. “Our wines are picked and sorted by hand, are destemmed (not crushed) into open vats with some whole bunches added, and separated by grape clone. We allow our wines to ferment with natural yeasts, and plunge the cap of our fermenting wines by hand. After 3-4 weeks on skins, the wines are pressed with a basket press, with the different batches put into high quality French Oak.

MAIPENRAI VINEYARD ... CLICK IMAGE TO VISIT THE WINERY WEBSITE AND PURCHASE STELLAR PINOT



“We typically employ 30-50% new French Oak, split between Taransaud, whose mild flavours complement Pinot Noir, and Francois Freres and Sirugue, which provide some extra complexity. The wines are allowed to sit on their lees through winter, and then are sulfured and racked in spring. We find our wines benefit from a longer time in barrel - we have settled on 22 months - which allows better integration of the oak and tannins. This is longer than most wines are kept in barrel (it adds extra cost), but seems appropriate for wines from our vineyard.



















“Towards the end of the maturation period, we do a comprehensive barrel tasting and blending exercise, to figure out what combination of barrels is of sufficient quality to be bottled under the Maipenrai label. In a year like 2007 (which was dominated by drought), no wine was selected for the Maipenrai label. These select wines are blended together, brought up to an acid and sulfur level necessary to be stable, and bottled with the vin-o-lok system, which features a glass cork. The remainder of the wines are blended together (and with any fruit sourced from other vineyards), and bottled as Amungula Creek wines using Stelvin screw tops. We have experimented with corks in the past, and we are absolutely convinced that our wines age properly under these modern closures, but in a way which is consistent from bottle to bottle, without cork taint, oxidisation, and other cork failures.”

When the Nobel representative phoned Prof Schmidt during the night, he thought it was his undergraduate students taking the piss, “although they were doing a pretty good Swedish accent”.

DARK ENERGY: NOBEL AND HIS TESTAMENT

But as the caller went on to read his citation, the full weight of the news gradually settled.

“I’ll have to discuss the money [AUS$1.5 million] with the team,” he said this morning, “but I think we’d all like to see it put to some sort of public good. As for now, I’ll be in there teaching my third-year cosmology students today, and getting on with plans to map the southern sky.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said “Australia has only 0.3 per cent of the world's population, but we’re producing three per cent of its knowledge, and as this award proves, a lot of that is absolutely world-class.”

Were our PM blessed with a higher gastronomic intelligence, she may have mentioned the Professor’s excellent Pinot noir and refined kitchen skills, and made that share six per cent, no?

NOT PINOT PEOPLE: PRIME MINISTER JULIA GILLARD WITH FIRST BLOKE TIM MATHIESON ... MORE ALONG THE LINES OF PINK ZIN AND MELLOW MERLOT?