Selfless Little Creatures
I was studying the label of a charming bottle of sweet wine when I noticed a phrase on the back which caught my interest.
It stated that the vines were grown on a 'bed of oyster shells'. At first I thought that this was a great piece of marketing to rebrand plain old limestone, or the writer of the label was feeling particularly flowery in prose, or indeed that there was an unbelievably successful oyster bar nearby with a questionable dumping policy. I am no paleontologist so I did a little research in the name of becoming less clueless.
It turns out that a long long time ago, in the Tertiary period, when the dinosaurs were dead (and Richard Attenborough was probably already thinking about bringing them back to life), lots of 'exogyra virgula', or 'comma' shaped oysters to us, turned into full stops deciding that life was dull, and the future of wine was a priority in their tiny bivalve minds over and above self preservation. This was a great sacrifice, provided that it is actually possible to distinguish between the wine aroma of a long dead fossilized oyster and that of any other dearly departed calcium based sea creature. What of the unrecognised molluscs, like clams or mussels, that also probably donated themselves to the cause? I have never seen a bottle acknowledging their services to the vine.
I presume then that a trained nose, on say a Chablis, can pick up the sent of the oyster bed beneath. But I imagine there are many other fossilized creatures other than oysters there, and I am guessing that a bright over enthusiastic paleontologist, much like 'Ross' from 'Friends', has confirmed that the majority of the limestone in these regions is oyster based?
It stated that the vines were grown on a 'bed of oyster shells'. At first I thought that this was a great piece of marketing to rebrand plain old limestone, or the writer of the label was feeling particularly flowery in prose, or indeed that there was an unbelievably successful oyster bar nearby with a questionable dumping policy. I am no paleontologist so I did a little research in the name of becoming less clueless.
It turns out that a long long time ago, in the Tertiary period, when the dinosaurs were dead (and Richard Attenborough was probably already thinking about bringing them back to life), lots of 'exogyra virgula', or 'comma' shaped oysters to us, turned into full stops deciding that life was dull, and the future of wine was a priority in their tiny bivalve minds over and above self preservation. This was a great sacrifice, provided that it is actually possible to distinguish between the wine aroma of a long dead fossilized oyster and that of any other dearly departed calcium based sea creature. What of the unrecognised molluscs, like clams or mussels, that also probably donated themselves to the cause? I have never seen a bottle acknowledging their services to the vine.
I presume then that a trained nose, on say a Chablis, can pick up the sent of the oyster bed beneath. But I imagine there are many other fossilized creatures other than oysters there, and I am guessing that a bright over enthusiastic paleontologist, much like 'Ross' from 'Friends', has confirmed that the majority of the limestone in these regions is oyster based?
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