Is it a bird?...It can't be a plane..

April 17 2010

Listen.....listen again...nothing, complete tranquillity. A strange sense of peace. Much like you are watching your first solar eclipse, it almost feels eerie.

There are no planes in the sky.

You then only realise the impact they have, silently urbanising the otherwise tranquil rural environment from above with their big noisy jets.

A beautiful day and deep blue skies, without the blemish of a vapour trail we now take for granted. You cannot see the cause however, a cloud of volcanic ash drifting almost purposely from Iceland, a stratospheric blanket of calm.

This definitely is a first.

I do feel for all the stranded people, and the stalled wheels of international business (Iceland getting its own back after the Icesave spat), but I can't help liking the Victorian skies.

I heard on the news that some volcanic particles were landing, and that you may be able to detect it on your car. I ran outside and then realised that the car was so well overdue a wash that I had no chance of distinguishing general grime from bits of Iceland.

There is amongst other things, lots of sulphur dioxide in the volcanic cloud. That should ring a bell with most people as being one of the components that can preserve wine. A.k.a E220. It does occur naturally in wine , but lashings can be added to guarantee longevity. Some bottles of white wine for example could otherwise quickly share the same fate as a discarded apple core, in a very short space of time turning brown with oxidation.

Lots of cheap mass produced wine could not last more than a few months without a dose of E220. Too much, and you get that rotten egg smell. Some say that the new screw tops are too efficient and have a tendency to keep SO2 (sulphur dioxide) in and oxygen out, which can lead sometimes to vaguely odd aromas.

So right now we all know what it feels like to be the wine in a bottle, bathed in very few parts per million of sulphur dioxide. We should walk around with t-shirts emblazoned with -

"warning, contains sulphites"

Maybe we will now live forever.

Martin said...

Love this title, you should be writing headlines for The Sun!

Steve said...

Your musings on sulphur dioxide in wine are rather wayward. Yes there are natural sulphur compounds in wine, these tend to come from the metabolism of proteins. They will also carry over from sulphur treatments on the vines. Most winemakers add sulphur dioxide at least at the start of fermentation either to slow down bacterial growth (bacteria are much more sensitive to it than yeasts) or to wipe out all natural yeast and allow the added yeast to dominate. There are a number of winemakers who add no suplhur at any stage, yes these wines can be a bit unstable, although the best will keep and improve for many years. The reason so many of the cheaper industrialised wines have such high doses of sulphur is that the raw materials are in very poor condition and the only way to stop the horror brew from turning to vinegar is to go OTT with sulphur. To say that lashings of sulphur are added to white wine to prevent oxidation is simply not true. Cheap rubbish wines have lots but most good wines will have very little sulphur in them. One of the most important things that makes a white wine a good keeper or not is pH, a low pH is essential. Wines with high sulphur dioxide will at best give you a lousy headache and at worst an allergic reaction. The supplhur does not escape from corks, it is slowly oxidised or bound up chemically and remains within the bottle. Stelvin caps may not let enough oxygen into a bottle and therefore cause reduction of the sulphur to smelly compounds such as hydrogen sulphide and mercaptans. It is a long and complicated process, but by and large wines with a lot of added sulphur are rubbish and should be avoided. We should press the wine industry to put a contents list on bottles like all other food products.....

Charlie said...

Steve, thanks for your technical insight. I do not claim to be an expert, just a learning wine novice who enjoys discovering it through casual drinking. I really value comments from people like yourself. I guess my post is generalised and light hearted, with strict factual waverings. The market appears to be dominated by the cheap 'industrialised wines', so much so that it does make sulphur dioxide appear more ubiquitous that it is in reality. You often need to be both knowledgeable and lucky to drink the good stuff.

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Is it a bird?...It can't be a plane..