HICKINBOTHAM SAYS PASTEUR WAS WRONG

Is Oz Too Obsessed With Germs?
Great Aussie Plonky Gets Volatile

Controversial Keynote Speech Delivered by Ian Hickinbotham RD Oe OAM at the Sydney International Wine Competition's Awards & Trophies Presentation Banquet 2009

Pasteur's pronouncement regarding wine was — and I say it slowly with Anglicised 'pronunciation' — if bacteria are present, 'le mal existait'. As the first Australian oenologist to 'allow' bacteria to grow in wine (to do the malo-lactic fermentation and at a time when an oenologist was sacked for not adding sulphur dioxide to prevent any secondary fermentation), perhaps I have a duty.

IAN HICKINBOTHAM RD Oe OAM - CLICK IMAGE FOR A REVIEW OF HIS ASTONISHING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There is a trade story from the days when Penfolds Grange was Grange Hermitage. Seems the Australian Wine Board's powerful tasting panel rejected the great wine for export on the grounds that the wine was volatile! To the credit of Penfolds and indeed, the wine industry itself (if true) the story was kept 'in house'.

'Volatility' is an all-embracing word: it means 'too much vinegar in a wine' — in various forms — and is invariably the consequence of bacterial activity.

There are commendable movements to revert to more natural ways and the word 'biodynamic' is much bandied, while last year at this august event, wine writer, Max Allen, expounded the biodynamic viticulture movement, mentioning the mystical cow's horn filled with manure, to be emptied onto the vineyard when the moon is in the right phase! Significantly, these attempts at embracing the old ways concern the 'growing' phase. My subject concerns the 'winemaking' phase — a natural extension, surely!

There are about 8 recognised diseases of wine, but you may never see any of them due to Australian oenology probably — not possibly — probably being the best in the world! I actually ponder if our wines are too clean now! English critics (who really lead the world) have been saying this another way, by asserting that our wines are bland, that they all taste the same and consequently have no reflection of 'place': they lack 'terroir'.

In 50 vintages, I saw 'graisse' in a wine once and it was indeed an experience — and spectacular. The wine was viscous: when poured from one glass into another, 'plopping' was quite audible! (In viscosity, it was more viscous than olive oil.) The event was the subject of recent correspondence to 'Wine International' magazine: we had missed adding sulphur dioxide to the new wine. French technical literature gave us the definition 'graisse', which can be loosely translated into our word 'fat'.

True, the content of sulphur dioxide in wine is a tenth of the amount added to some foods, especially commercial smorgasbord type salads, but even Japanese would not buy black apricots! Importantly, it is commendable that when I started as an apprentice, 400 parts per million was a normal dosage to Riesling wines, but a quarter of that addition would be considered quite excessive by current oenologists.

Another disease I saw in the 1950s afflicted a million litres of dry red made from Shiraz and Grenache that was undrinkable because of intense bitterness of taste, a consequence of unbridled activity by some bacteria!

Again, the remedy turned on judicious use of sulphur dioxide and clarification. The bitterness had resulted from bacteria attacking the natural glycerine of the wine: the French define the disease as amertume. (It is not generally known that glycerine is about the 4th natural component of table wines, after water, alcohol and acid.) Significantly, that wine became the second Australian dry red to win an international Gold medal!

LOUIS PASTEUR: WRONG?

Still another disease (and one you may well have seen without knowing) is 'tourne', which was described by Louis Pasteur himself. As the name implies, it turns dry red brown in colour with loss in desirable fruitiness when only months old. The disease is caused by bacteria attacking the natural tartaric acid in dry red wine, but such wine is at least drinkable!

Also drinkable, and actually appreciated by some (including some wine writers) are white wines that develop the distinctive smell of lychee fruit. This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation.

Current winemakers have their own scourge in the form of Brettanomyces, commonly known as "brett". This wayward yeast affects dry red wine and 'metallic taste' seems to be the common descriptor. Prevention centres on increased use of sulphur dioxide, while oenologists are almost blamed for being all too sedulous, thereby bringing the scourge upon themselves!

Ancient civilisations drank increasingly acescent wines during the year, just because they could not keep their wine away from air and the ever-present bacteria progressively turned all of their table wines to vinegar. Vintage festivals are a reminder: they were the wonderful celebration of the new wine, which really meant – no more having to drink near vinegar: indeed at eleven months the ancients were drinking almost straight vinegar. Tourists in Europe today are still heartened to see the telltale bush affixed to the winemaker's door to inform the traveller that the new wine is ready.

It was only some 300 years ago (not long in the 10,000 year saga) that the English made better bottles, that lead to the use of cork, which neatly compensated for the small differences in bottle mouth dimensions and protected wine from air somewhat.

When I trained as an oenologist in 1950, an inordinate amount of time was spent teaching us to recognise acescence. Indeed we were actually trained to decrease our thresholds of perception, with wines containing decreasing volatile acidity! Importantly, it was instilled into us that if a wine displayed traces of volatile acidity, then it would assuredly get worse. Volatile acidity would inevitably increase with aging. So the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine Board (now the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation) rejected wines with trace amounts of volatile acidity. Today, that assertion is no longer valid, because for at least 20 years, oenologists can remove every bacterium that could increase the volatile acidity in wines!

Remembering that Grange has a relatively high volatile acidity — deliberately — and the official tasting panel is charged with approving every wine intended for export, the panel comprises tasters who live near Adelaide. Further, given that the task is voluntary and panellists are called at short notice (often so the wine can be loaded onto a departing ship), panellists are generally retired wine industry executives — who — importantly, were trained in detection of miniscule amounts of volatile acidity in wines. Add to that normal human competitiveness — who can detect the lowest threshold amount of Volatile Acidity — and we have panels that are hell-bent on detecting volatile acidity — and rejecting them for export. Contrary to the out-dated entrenched opinion, though such a modern wines may contain traces of volatile acidity — its amount will not increase: there are no bacteria in such modern bottled wines!

So we do not need the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation? Perhaps they are actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers.

Our two sons went to Bordeaux and Burgundy universities. Stephen told me that at Bordeaux University they actually teach that bacteria and moulds on grapes contribute something to the final wine!

Renowned English critic, Michael Broadbent, wrote in 'Decanter' Magazine in 2006:

“All were aware that Robert Parker had given the 1990 100 points. The fault is brettanomyces. Like volatile acidity it is often present, can even enhance the smell and taste. But over a certain level of noticeability, it is a fault. The day I was drafting this article I telephoned Farr Vintners, ‘when did you last sell 1990 Montrose?’ ‘We sold a case this morning: £2,200 in bond’.”

Finally, let's consider the famous pronouncement of the French professor long ago:

"If we did not interfere in the winemaking process, we would be drinking vinegar — not wine — as vinegar is the end product of Nature's glorious scheme"!

THE RADICAL SCIENCE OF BOILING BEER

LOUIS PASTEUR: CHANGED BEER AS MUCH AS WINE

The Beautiful Beer Of Revenge

Frog Beats Hun By Boiling The Suds

TRANSCRIPT OF RADIO NATIONAL'S THE SCIENCE SHOW WITH ROBYN WILLIAMS - 10 FEBRUARY 2002

Summary: Dr. Alan Baxter from the Centenary Institute in Sydney tells the story about "the beer of revenge".

As a result of the Franco-Prussian war Louis Pasteur, whose name is usually associated with milk, was left with an obsessive hatred for Germans. At the time Germany's main export was beer. Pasteur vowed to destroy Germany's primary export market by developing the world's best beer in France. He dubbed this "the beer of revenge".

Robyn Williams: If I told you that we’re now going to talk about the science of beer, there’s a fair chance you’ll infer straight away that it’s time to be flippant, make a few puns, go in for some drollery. In fact the science of beer, you’ll be pleased to know, helped revolutionise chemistry and the understanding of the molecules which make life possible.

For such an insight we must thank Dr Alan Baxter, who’s head of the Autoimmunity Research Group at the Centenary Institute in Sydney, and author of the book ‘Germ Warfare – Breakthroughs in Immunology’ which we talked about last year. And Alan Baxter begins the tale with one of the greatest names in the history of science.

Alan Baxter: "Today, Louis Pasteur’s name is usually associated with milk. After all, it appears on every carton and bottle of the stuff. But his major contribution to Australian society lies not so much in the milk bar, as in the public bar. Since he disliked the taste of beer, the basis for his interest in it is somewhat obscure, but it makes an interesting story and it’s probably worth telling.

"Pasteur’s reputation as a chemist had been established when he discovered that some organic molecules exist in two different orientations, or isoforms, related to each other by reflective symmetry. Since only one of these two orientations ever occurs in plants and animals, this led him to propose that chemical orientation provided a criterion to distinguish between living organisms and the inert, inorganic world. On this basis he did not believe in the spontaneous generation of life, and his fiery opposition to the idea led him to be regarded as something of an expert on biological matters. He became a freelance scientific consultant advising on a range of agricultural and industrial problems. In doing so, he greatly enhanced his reputation by identifying the organisms that spoiled wine and vinegar, and those that killed silkworms, discoveries that made a significant impact on the French economy.

"But Pasteur’s principal interests lay with basic science, not industry. ‘There is no such thing as applied sciences,’ he said, ‘only applications of science.’ Seeking to establish a publicly funded research laboratory at his university, the Ecole Normale, he wrote to the Emperor Napoleon III: ‘I wish for a spacious laboratory where experiments can be performed conveniently without danger to public health. Some of my current experiments relate to the transformation of organic matter after death, and … these studies can only proceed if a fully equipped laboratory is set up. The time has come to free the experimental science from the fetters of poverty.’

"The Emperor’s support was quickly gained. By the end of 1867 plans had been drawn up and the ground breaking for the construction of the new laboratory took place in the summer of 1868. Pasteur monitored the builders’ daily progress from the dining room window of his university accommodation across the Rue d’Ulm from the work site.

"Louis Pasteur felt unwell throughout most of the 19th October of that year. Despite an oppressive fatigue and a fleeting prickling sensation down his left side, he attended a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and fulfilled the rest of his commitments for the day. On his return home, he excused himself from dinner and retired early. That evening he was felled by a massive cerebral haemorrhage in which he lost the power of speech and the use of his left limbs. Doctors were called and leeches were applied.

"Of those that rushed to his bedside, one of the first to reach him was his dear friend, Pierre-Augustin Bertin. Pasteur and Bertin had met as students, and their professional paths had intersected more than once since. Bertin, as Head of Scientific Studies at the university, was technically Pasteur’s boss, but his desolation at the disaster that had befallen his colleague betrayed a much closer relationship.

"Madame Pasteur and Monsieur Bertin conspired to nurture the invalid through his convalescence. Gradually Pasteur recovered somewhat. His speech returned first, and then his power of thought. His body healed more slowly, and he never regained the use of his left hand. Every day, as he lay in his bed, he asked visitors for news of the construction of his new laboratory. And every day, under strict instruction, his visitors gave him vaguely unsatisfying responses. Finally, Pasteur dragged himself through to the dining room window and hauled himself up to his feet. The desperate effect of what he saw was as great an upset as the stroke itself, for within an hour of the news of his illness, all work on the laboratory had stopped dead.

"His raging bitterness was relayed through a well-connected visitor and he quickly received an apology from the Emperor and an assurance that the project would be completed. But work was again interrupted in July 1870 by Germany’s invasion of France during the Franco-Prussian War. By October, the Germans had captured the Emperor and Paris was besieged. Furthermore, Pasteur’s only son, Jean-Baptiste, had enlisted and was now gravely ill with typhoid.

"Pasteur’s anguish at the national crisis was magnified by the loss of his laboratory and the threat to his son’s life. The war had jeopardised everything he cared about: Nation, Family and Science, and he was physically incapable of fighting back. This overwhelming feeling of impotence left him with an obsessive hatred of Germans and their nation, and by the end of the war Pasteur had formulated a plan to avenge his nation’s honour.

"At the time, although Germany had become the world leader in industrial chemistry, her main export was beer. Indeed, as part of the reparations demanded of France, Germany had subsumed Alsace and Lorraine, where hops were the primary crop and much of France’s own beer production had been based. German beer outsold local brews throughout most of central Europe because it tasted better and kept longer, and its continued sale in France irritated Pasteur intensely. He planned to destroy Germany’s primary export market by developing the world’s best beer in France, a brew he dubbed ‘the beer of revenge’.

"Beer is produced by fermenting water in which malted barley has been steeped. The carbon dioxide that gives beer its head is released by the yeast as a by-product of fermentation. Hop flowers are added prior to fermentation, because their aromatic oils act as a preservative and add to the taste of the finished product. Originally, all beers were dark and heavy, similar to the porters, stouts and brown ales of Britain. The major advance made by Germany in the 1860s was to develop strains of yeast that maintained their activity at temperatures near freezing. Fermentation achieved at such low temperatures proceeded so slowly that the beer had to be cellared over the whole winter instead of for just a few weeks. Furthermore, the yeast, instead of being buoyed to the top of the brew by the carbon dioxide produced (called ‘top fermentation’), sank to the bottom of the barrels and contributed little to the taste of the product. This was called ‘bottom fermentation’, or ‘lagering’, and the resulting lager beers were pale straw coloured, light in flavour and body, and kept extraordinarily well.

"Pasteur correctly surmised that the primary reason for beer spoilage was the presence of contaminating organisms. He quickly identified those most commonly spoiling brewery yeast samples and developed methods for excluding them from large-scale fermentations. He also developed new strains of heat-stable yeast that acted more rapidly without significantly contributing to the taste of the beer.

"Pasteur had by this time returned to his old haunt at the Ecole Normale. He bought a brewery kettle and installed a fermentation vat in the basement of the as yet unfinished laboratory complex nearby. Bertin’s interest in Pasteur’s experimental progress increased dramatically, betraying a fond familiarity with the subject under scrutiny. Bertin had developed a fancy for fine ales when he had worked in Strasbourg and a strange collaboration developed between the two men. Bertin’s sober responsibility was to steadily drink his way through Pasteur’s experimental results in order to provide a critical appraisal of each batch. Bertin’s high-spirited laughter and good humour did much to enliven the laboratory, and he pointed out to Pasteur more than once that there is much more to good beer than just keeping it free from infection.

‘First make me a good bock,’ he said, ‘and then you can tell me about it!’

"Pasteur travelled widely throughout Europe, demonstrating the key aspects of his methods to commercial brewers. The Whitbread Brewery in Britain and the Carlsberg Brewery in Denmark still attribute their success to visits by Pasteur in the 1870s. An even greater influence was attained on the publication of his book ‘Studies on Beer’, which immediately became the essential brewers’ manual.

"A brilliant young Belgian brewer, Auguste de Bavay, met Pasteur on one of his trips and adopted his methods before emigrating to Melbourne, where he was employed at the Victoria Parade Brewery. Because of the warmer temperatures in Australia, de Bavay had to adapt Pasteur’s methods to top fermentation. To protect against spoilage, he added greater amounts of hops, and fermented to a higher alcohol content. The highly fertile soils and plentiful sunshine resulted in increased levels of protein in the barley, which caused clouding of the beer. So de Bavay replaced some of the barley malt with cane sugar. The resulting beer was that now characteristic of Australia: light in colour and body, but tasting strongly of bitter hops. This style, although correctly described as a ‘bitter’ in Australia, is usually mistaken for a lager in Britain.

"De Bavay was quickly promoted to chief brewer at Fosters, a position he held from 1894 to 1904. For much of this time, he also acted as a bacteriologist for the University of Melbourne and used the influence gained from that role to fight for improvements in the quality of the Melbourne water supply. In 1889, his denouncement of the city’s fire plugs, claiming that they admitted sewerage and typhoid bacilli into the domestic water supply, resulted in a Royal Commission and the eventual removal of the devices. Although his primary interest was to protect the product of the brewery from infection, his efforts did much to protect the city’s population likewise.

"And what of Pasteur? Well he too saw the parallel between the infection of an ale and human disease. ‘Seeing that beer and wine undergo profound alterations because these liquids have given shelter to microscopic organisms,’ he wrote, ‘how can one help being obsessed by the thought that phenomena of the same kind can and must sometimes occur in humans and animals.’ It was this analogy that drove him on to study cholera, anthrax, erysipelas and finally rabies, culminating in the development of the rabies vaccine.

"His strategy of revenge was also very successful. Indeed, so successful was it that to this day, even though some German beers are widely regarded as being among the best in the world, very little is exported. The irony is that the German breweries rendered idle by Pasteur’s strategy were adapted to manufacture acetone for cordite production. Thus Pasteur’s vengeance indirectly helped to equip Germany for their attack on France in the First World War.

Robyn Williams: The paradoxes of history. Alan Baxter, from the Centenary Institute in Sydney. His book, Germ Warfare which is about immunology, not Saddam Hussein, is published here by Allen & Unwin.

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And ever the twain shall meet

by PHILIP WHITE

In the late ’seventies, when Tony Bilson worked the pans at the mighty Berowra Waters Inn, serving French-influenced cuisine with European-style wines, we developed contentious theories about wine not marrying harmoniously to Chinese cuisine.

After Shen Nong discovered the importance of boiling drinking water for good health 3,000 years back, it wasn’t long before some Camellia sinensis fell into the pot and teas began to evolve alongside Chinese regional dishes.

We felt that food which had developed over millennia with tea would only work with wine if it became more tea-like. Our new “fruit-driven” wines were heading further away from tea in structure.

In 1998 Senior Professor Bert Vallee, of the Harvard Medical School, reported that many Asians did not produce the dehydrogenase which processes alcohol in the liver. As tea-drinkers, there was no need for their DNA to switch the mechanism on. But the smallest shot of grog made them very drunk, and sick until their skin managed to sweat the poison out.

European cultures, in contrast, developed in filthy big cities where the water was lethal. Although tea was common on posh tables by 1700, Round Eyes didn’t understand the importance of boiling water until Pasteur. Since the Georgians began drinking wine in about 5,000BC, we’d evolved drinking fermented brews, with all their vitamins, minerals and antioxidant tannins. Vallee even suggested that "…throughout western history the normal state of mind may have been one of inebriation".

In contrast, the Chinese may have been wide awake with kung-fu chai, but they were relatively sober and healthy until we hit them with opium, which we took there from India - to swap for tea - until 1908.

While this seemed to reinforce our theory, twenty years of determined thirsty travel in the meantime taught me that China, and Asia, have teas of a much wider range of flavours, colours, and textures than anybody ever dreamed of achieving in wines.

There are fatty, cheesy teas that taste like big malo-lactic chardonnays; unfermented green teas as crisp and savoury as verdelho or sauvignon blanc; pu-erh teas like plummy, tarry shiraz; teas as nutty and cherry-like as pinot noir. The aged cake teas of Yunnan can be as sweet, leathery and meaty as mourvedre or muscat; good jasmine can be as floral and spicy as Alsace gewürztraminer; some chrysanthemum teas are like aged pinot gris.

So, to think backwards, any Asian cuisine that grew up with teas like those should just as easily be enjoyed with such wines.

The human mouth detects sweet, sour, salt, bitter, water, chilli heat, and umami (a combination of glutamates - like MSG - and ribonucleotides). Just as these totally natural flavours harmonise in good food, they make up the pleasant aspects of good tea and wine.

But the trick of successfully marrying them on the table is as much about texture as actual flavour. So the viscosity, or the oiliness of the food and drink, and the degree of polymerisation, or softening, of its naturally preservative tannins, provide vital keys to the sort of cuisine you can experience at the table of a genius like Cheong.

Even the dreaded “fruit-drivens”, like sauvignon blanc, simple rosé, or unwooded chardonnay, often go very well with the spicy, chilli, ginger and verbena cuisines of Thailand and Malaysia, which have traditionally been eaten with fresh fruit juices as much as simpler teas.

Acids are also very important. Leaner ones, like ascorbic, tartaric and malic, dominate sauvignon blanc and riesling, while the fatty amino acids that we first taste in mother’s milk occur in wines which have undergone the secondary, or malo-lactic fermentation, in which bacteria, not yeast, convert the hard, metallic, malic acid of chardonnay or red grapes to the softer lactic acid of milk.

With acid and viscosity, the clever host might just as well devise a contrasting effect as much as a harmonious marriage. If you’re serving a fatty fish, like European carp, or steamed flounder, you can choose whether to bolster that characteristic with a big fat pinot gris or peachy wood-aged chardonnay, or provide a piquant counterpoint with a crunchy sauvignon blanc, its acid like the oxalic flavour of rhubarb, to slice through the fat of the bottom-feeding flounder, with its guts full of bottom-of-the sea roadkill.

Similarly, the fat of bottom-feeding ducks or pigs can be contrasted or reinforced, which is why they go so well with pinot noir, which can be either chubby with malo fat or more austere and steely, like riesling.

But in the end, while the secret may seem a mysterious marriage of new science and ancient gastronomic dreaming, you can forget it if your ingredients aren’t the very best. Start fresh, clean, and organic and your journey of exploration will be much less hazardous than mine. But I’m not compaining.