Drunks outlive their brains

By PHILIP WHITE – This was published in The Independent Weekly in September 2007

I’m confused. While many of us seem determined to drink ourselves to death, too many are nevertheless living longer than our brains were designed to last. So awful things like Alzeimer’s disease are increasingly common.

Confusingly, one scientific report last week found that quite a few regular drinks actually prevents erectile dysfunction. Coming on top of the years of cant insisting that red wine is a cornucopia of anti-oxidant lovelies, rotely repeated by mongers of tea, chocolate, coffee, and whatnot, it’s obvious that far too many bibulous buggers will outlive our brains. And possibly procreate our way past the realms of intelligent consciousness if we keep giving the booze a nudge.

The gene pool will be increasingly dominated by drunks who outlive their brains.

The first sign of the brain tumour which killed George Gershwin was his constant complaint that he could smell rubber, which he thenceforth avoided. Think frangers. Drunk men with worn out brains and George Gershwin’s tumour could well procreate their way to total dominance of the gene pool. Rhapsody in Blue!

Last week’s Archives of General Psychiatry reports that the earliest indicator of the onset of Alzeimer’s is the decay of one’s sense of smell. Onion, black pepper, lemon, banana, cinnamon, chocolate, pineapple, rose, smoke, soap – the minute you find yourself missing these whiffs is the first signal that you’re destined to end up walking around with your underpants on your head while you try to phone your kids on the TV remote.

This horrifies the wine critic who’s constantly ridiculed for reporting such aromas in wine. Few boofheads understand that there are only a certain number of aromatic compounds, which repeat, in myriad combinations, through all foodstuffs.

Now, when sniggering buffoons buttonhole me about how wine could never possibly smell of pineapple or bananas – “It smells like bloody woyne to me” – I know they’ll be well on the way to the zombie twilight zone and the room with combination locks, nappies, and the Big Nurse.

But that’s not the end of it. I reckon one’s aroma vocabulary, and the library in the brain that records it and stores it, is well and truly established and finalised by the time you’re about eight years of age, maybe earlier.

So an old brute like me, who grew up in an enyclopaedia of wondrous smells in the mountains of eastern Victoria in the ’fifties, is threatened most of all by the cruel reality that there’s hardly a bastard alive who knows what those things that set my imagination afire smell like.

Take malo-lactic fermentation, often called secondary fermentation. This is where bacteria, not yeast, ferment the harsh malic acid of grapes, and convert it to the softer malic acid of milk. This is the first flavour we ever savour, from the most beloved and trusted source: Mum’s teat.

In wine, lactic acid often smells of transformed dairy products, like custard and junket. Once the breast was cruelly withdrawn, I grew up on custard and junket. Who the hell alive today has ever smelt such stuff? How many of today’s lot even got a suck of that lovely teat?

Put white wine, like a pear-smelling cool climate semillon, in oak for a wild yeast ferment, and you get the aromas of superphosphate sacks (from the yeast and soil), and the indelibly imprinted whoof of my grand-dad’s old wooden grange, in which were stored hessian sacks of pears. As the unsold ones gradually ripened and slid to decay, they gave a wondrously evocative perfume; one which I’ve smelled many times in beautiful ageing oaked semillons.

But how many of today’s humans have ever been in a wooden grange in the mountain pines, stacked with over-ripe fruits in old superphosphate sacks? Who can understand me suggesting a wine smells like a cowshed when the only cowshed left smells like a hospital? I mean, c’mon, milk doesn’t even smell like milk anymore.

So while I remain terrified that losing my sense of smell heralds the onset of Alzeimer’s, and find myself constantly checking for the faintest whiff of rubber, I’m stuck with an aroma vocab that for all intents and purposes would be best forgotten anyway.

Stick with me. We’ll drink our way through this.

PINOT IS LIKE RIESLING

Pinot is like Riesling

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

“I’ve learned about three things about pinot in the last twenty-five years” muttered Stephen George, who often makes my favourite Australian versions of it at Ashton Hills. He didn’t expand. Already halfway into the car, I left without asking. We’ve been discussing pinot noir for decades.

Pinot is a felicitous, difficult, but sometimes heady, sensual, hypnotic and salacious red grape. Stephen’s success in it comes from his curious sensory intelligence and stoic patience, as much as from the high altitude, cool, and peculiar soil of the vineyard. He and his partner, Peta van Rood, acquired this from her pioneering parents, Peter and Sophie, both deceased. Commenced in 1982, it’s away up in the crown of the Piccadilly Valley, near Mount Bonython, and they’ve spent the years trialling many ways of growing many clones of the same variety.

You will usually find pinot addicts where the best duck or pig is served. They guts in exclusive bunches, bellies nudging the table like the rubbing strakes of so many tugboats, perversely muttering and mooing over very big glasses. The hard core will never be seen drinking pinot from anywhere other than Burgundy. If more of them could be as relaxed about their fetish as Stephen and Peta, good pinot would be a much bigger hit.

At Ashton Hills, a bottle might cost you thousands of dollars less than the preposterous legends from Burgundy.

Proper pinot is more like riesling in structure than any red grape. Pinot is about acidity, and grown in the right places, riesling is the king of acidity.

Riesling has fruit aromas of lemon, lime, pear, nashi pear, and to a lesser degree of acidity and spine, banana, pineapple, and sometimes white stone fruits. The best pinots have the same rapier of acidity as great rieslings, and share the same lithe texture, weight and structure, but their fruit aromas are cranberry, raspberry, various sorts of cherry, baby beetroot, pink meats, and whatnot. Pink and light red, not white and yellow.

As great rieslings age, their fruits decay to marmalades of lime, lemon, ginger, and maybe even orange. Pinots, too, become more like conserves of the fruits they began with. Not full-bore, boiled jams, but lighter conserves, where there are still whole berries in the mix. The fruit remains alive. Oak provides cinnamon and nutmeg spicing.

Acids have individual flavours. Tartaric tastes metallic. Ascorbic - vitamin C – is like aluminium. Citric’s all lemons and limes. Oxalic acid’s soursobs and rhubarb. Aspalgic has mild flavour, but smells like the water closet at an asparagus dinner. Malic acid’s slightly less metallic than tartaric or ascorbic. Lactic acid is fatty, creamy, and custardy, like the first drink you get after the Big Nurse smacks you on the bum and hands you back to your new Mother. Comforting, and milky. These occur in wine; mystifying combinations occur in Pinot.

I’m overwhelmed by the power and acidity of the Ashton Hills Riesling 2005 ($19, 13 per cent alcohol, and 93 points). Like the Swedish fencing instructor I never had, she’s lithe, wiry, sensual and lean. I want her to thrash me long after she’s grey.

The entry level Ashton Hills Piccadilly Pinot Noir 2005 ($24; 13.5; 88 points) has coarser tannin than its more expensive kin. That makes it more macho: the furry tannin covers its acid spine. It lacks sensuality, but it’s your best opener.

Move up to the $45, 2005 Estate model (all from the estate vineyard – 14%; 93 points) and you see more cherry and lemon, and a great deal more sensuality with that finer tannin, greater viscosity, and more prominent acidity. Like the riesling, this wine will earn more points as it matures.

And so will the ravishing 2004 Reserve ($56; 14%; 94). It’s gorgeous. Maraschino, raspberry, wild cherry, spicy oak, slender but sensual viscosity, and heaps of natural acid, from newly ripening cherries to lime and lemon, are its hallmarks.

Half way through what I thought was my own radical posturising, Stephen produced a book that also suggested pinot was like riesling. Miffed,I refuse to remember it. “Most of the places that grow good pinot will grow good riesling”, he said, avoiding mention of Burgundy, where the arcane appellation laws forbid riesling plantations. “But it doesn’t always work in reverse.”

More mystification. More thirst.

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