Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 351 - Le Sommelier - Wine, Health, Happiness

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

Certified sommelier Karl Kazaks from Primland.com gives Dr Steve and Lady D some edumakation on wine. Dr Steve's famous "cyst juice" homemade wine is reviewed. Articles on health and wine are discussed. STUFF.DOCTORSTEVE.COM SIMPLYHERBALS.NET NOOM.DOCTORSTEVE.COM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why are Grizzly such good hikers? They only carry the bare necessities. You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, Riotcast.com. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Subolivide stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my infertable woes. I want to take my brain now,

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The best earbuds for the money and the best customer service anywhere that's tweakeda audio.com offer code fluid. And then noom. Dottersteve.com. I'm down 22 pounds. I'm a little bit stuck right now, but I'm going to get there. And that's part of Noom is understanding when you get stuck. It's not the end of the world.

And you just persevere and don't stress about it, and it'll happen. So Noom.com. By the way, in doing this Noom app, I've been tracking my weight. And, of course, that's not the only measure you want to look at, but it is an important measure. And I notice that it looks like a stock ticker of a stock that's constantly falling, which is good. But, you know, bouncing up and down and up and down, and then you'll have these areas, which we'll call in technical analysis support,

which is sort of a price in the stock market where that stock will hit, and then it'll kind of bounce back up again, and it has difficulty getting below that or above that. and there can be resistance and then there can be support. So when I see my weight start to, or, you know, my 20-day moving average start to level off, I see that as an area of support. And what that corresponds to is this concept of the set point being a point that your body likes to be at as far as its weight is concerned. And so, you know, for a while there, I could eat what I wanted to, not eat, and I'd stay around 188.

Now, I've changed my set point to around 165, and it likes to be there. So I'm having this period of support. But one thing that you'll find, and there are sort of technical indicators that will show that you're going to drop below that support, and that's what I'm looking for. So I've developed a statistical tool based on, for those of you. you that do some technical analysis, the Bollinger bands, what that is is you take two standard deviations above the mean and two standard deviations below the mean and plot that against this 20-day moving average. And you get these bands that will shrink and expand depending on how volatile. In other words, in my case, with the weight, how much my weight's going up and down and how

much it's staying the same and uh it gives you a really nice view of where you're going with this you know and it's encouraging to me because i'm actually uh staying at the bottom half of those bollinger bands which is what you want when you see something that's falling and uh my 20 day smooth uh simple moving average is continuing to decline downward so if anybody's interested in that let me know i'll send you, I have a, you can do it in an Excel or you can do it in Mac pages, and I can send you that template. Okay, just email me, weird medicine at riotcast.com, I think still works, or you can go to Dr. Steve.com and just click contact.

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You could just download everything and then cancel your subscriptions. It's totally fine to do that. premium.doctrsteve.com. I recommend that you listen to the show using the Weird Medicine app, which you can get at the app store or at Google Play. Okay, well, let's get started. I have in the studio today, Carl Kazax, he's the director of food and beverage at Primland. And it's Primland now, not Primland, right? When we used to call, they would say, you know, good afternoon, Primeland.

And then I noticed in the last couple of years they've stopped saying that. And now it's Primland. Primland. All right. Very good. He's worked since 2009 when he was a part of the team that opened the lodge at Primland, which, by the way, go to primland. It's insane. Or just go to Primland.

Or go to Primland itself. And that thing that you see is not a grain silo, that is an observatory. Really? Yeah, it's the craziest place in the world. It's the most relaxing place on Earth, number five in the U.S. for resorts, correct? Yes, highly rated resort, and it does have a telescope and top of the building, essentially, where you can stand up there and watch the roof retract and take pictures of the sky with the telescope. Or you can just lay around and drink like my wife does.

I like that, too. Carl is a certified sommelier and has worked with wine for over 20 years, having worked at a winery and a wine store in addition to numerous restaurants. restaurants and resorts. So my first question, how do you really say correctly? Somoye. Samoye. Yes. Okay. And what's the derivation of that word? Well, it derives from a French word, which is the art of wine service, somelierie. Wow. Like charcutory. Correct. Except, right. Wine. Interesting. Okay. Very good. Because everyone chops that word all up. So, I mean, do you have to pass a test to become a Amelier. Well, I feel like I should ask Dr. Steve whether doctors need to pass a test to become a doctor. Yes, we do. We have to pass very many. But I've heard that you can just be the wine

steward at a restaurant and call yourself a salmelier. That is true. You can call yourself a sommelier without having to pass a test. However, I am a certified sommelier through their International Guild of Master Sommelier. So there's different accrediting organizations. It's a little bit like scuba diving. There's Naui and Patty. There's different organizations that accredit someone who wants to be a sommelier. So give me your certification again. You are certified sommelier through the International Guild of Master of Somaliers. And that...

Good job. That organization has become pretty well known through a movie called S-O-M-M. I've been meaning to watch that. So that's been a couple years now, but it traces. the steps of some people who are testing to be a master sommelier which is a couple steps, two steps above where I am. So I'm certified and there's

advanced and sommelier above that master. Not everybody could be one because you have to have certain taste and nose skills that not everyone has, right? Well, the way the test works, there's multiple parts. There's a written test to see if you have book knowledge.

Then there's that blind tasting test that you speak about there, lady diagnosis, to see if you can taste what's in a wine. And then there's a practical service test which is formatted somewhat like someone taking his or her boards because

you're in front of a group of people who are all master's themselves asking you a question while you're opening a bottle of champagne, doing other wine-related service tasks like decanting a bottle of wine. Instead of asking questions like where you from, how's the weather, what do you

recommend we do here, they'll ask what's your favorite sub-region of Bojolay or what's the aging requirements for a Kianti Klossico Reserva? Oh, I was going to ask you that. So lots of information we had. And that's got to be incredibly stressful. We have a thing called clinical simulation. When you are in medical school, you have to do it as a fourth year, and you have to go and

see patients and do exams in front of a panel of people. And it's incredibly, even though you know this stuff, you've been doing it for four years, you know it, you know it cold. It's incredibly stressful to sit in front of people who are judging you. Especially when they're experts on what you're talking about also. So you know you better get it right. Like you're talking to me, you can tell me anything and you know. That's right. It can be nerve-wracking.

But as with Dr. Steve mentioned with medicine, there's people that you can practice in advance too. It's a good thing to do. Yeah, yeah, no, it is good. Let me, I'm just going to jump to this before we get to all the regular sommelier stuff. What about the Brochet study? Are you familiar with the Brochet study of Frederick Brochet? Is that about the Resveritol or which one? No, this was one where he took some, these were actually, they weren't listed as sommeliers.

they were listed as oniologists. Okay, anologist, yes. Enologists? Yeah. So what he did was he looked at sight and smell cues. So he gave them each a sampling of a white wine

and then a red wine and had them mark the different characteristics where they're notes of cherries and this kind of thing. And then he grouped those characteristics, then he had them come back a week later and he gave them white wine that he tinted with red food coloring. And amazingly, all of the characteristics of the white wine totally changed to those of the red wine. So he postulated that they're not stupid or wrong and that there's no value to it,

but that the visual cues actually changed their perception of the taste. well that's very interesting on a related note sometimes people will use black wine glasses there you go that's going to be my question exactly so you won't know is it a white wine

or a red wine and say you pour a red wine in the glass and someone might say it's the opposite so it can be very humbling to try to blind taste but I do have an anecdote I can tell you about

how you can identify wine that doesn't necessarily relate to the sense of smell because there's this famous British wine critic named Harry Waugh who actually had a nose accident in the middle of his life. And so, of course, he was any, and that led to him losing his sense of smell. So how do you be a wine critic after that?

Well, he had help from his wife. But he also was able to develop ways to identify wine beyond just the sense of smell specifically texture in the mouth. I just recently read an anecdote about him where he had done a blind tasting with a panel of other renowned British wine critics, and this was post his nose accent. They didn't even give him a glass of wine, but he said, go ahead, give me a glass of wine. The other critics, they couldn't figure out what it was, but he said, this has the texture

of a Jabalé la Chappelle 1978. Well, that was the exact wine it was, different vintage, but he could add. identify it even without a sense of smell. Wow. So just by the chemical receptors in his tongue? He said by this, he said texturally, this reminds me of X-1. That's incredible. So that makes, I've been thinking in my head, I've got to kind of train myself to pay attention to those things too and not just the flavors of limestone and sherry and the aromas that you get in the wine.

Have you ever done a wine tasting where you just put a close pin over your nose? and tried to... Oh, that's a good question. I've tasted wine when I've been stopped up. Oh, yeah? My nose, you know, congested, but I've never tried a close-spin. Well, I'm just thinking, you know, that would be one way to sort of negate the, at least part of your sense of smell. That's an interesting idea.

And then now you can concentrate on other things. I'm doing this weight loss thing called Noom. And one of the things that they have you do is to take food in and just put it on your tongue and let it sit there. and taste it and try to experience all of the different aspects of it so that you're being more mindful and you're eating. And I just wonder if that would be an interesting experiment. We have some wine here that we're going to try later, and maybe we could try that. It might be beneficial if we plug to our nose. We may need to.

This is some of my cyst juice wine as Opie and Jim Norton and Anthony, you know, named it many years ago. In fact, I found the French word for cyst juice and named it that. Are there sulfites in it? No, there's no sulfites in it. And that's a question that I have on my list, actually. What about sulfites? My dad was a winemaker. Did he use sulfites?

He, his wine had very heavy notes of sodium metabisulfide. And for some reason, he thought that that was a, you know, a good thing to do. So what about preservatives like sodium metabisulfide in particular and then sulfites in general in wine? Well, metabolosyl bisulfite is used in wineries to clean equipment, not just, to preserve wines. And why that's important before we get in the sulfides is, if you think about how you might clean something at home, you might use bleach, but bleach has chlorine in it.

And you don't want free chlorine atoms floating around a winery because it can lead to trichloral TCA, which is a chemical responsible for a flaw in bottled wine called corked, or wine being cork, corkiness. So TCA is what is the associated chemical with a corked wine. So that's, if you ever see a sommelier, let me pour this wine for you, sir, madame, at the table. A little sample first. The point of that is not, do you really like it?

Although, if you don't like it, we'll take it back. But the point is, is this wine correct? And there's a lot of reasons why a wine could be incorrect. It could have been stored improperly and gotten what we call cooked. And it just doesn't taste the right way. It could taste a little sherry, it could taste a little matterized like Madeira. It could taste. Is that if you store it standing up rather than on its side?

It's primarily at too high of a temperature. Okay. So, you know, most wine is consumed within, most wine that's purchased is consumed within 24 hours of being purchased. So it's really, once you start to get geeky and wanting to store wine and collect wine that you have to pay attention to how it's stored. So even if you went into the store and bought a $100 bottle wine in August and then you can, kept shopping all afternoon and you just left that wine in your car in the parking lot. This actually happened to me once years ago. I came out and the cork had popped up, you know, halfway out of the neck of the bottle

because the heat and pressure had caused it to gone out. That actually happened to me in the cold once, too. Actually, this past winter, I just forgot about a bottle of wine. I had the car and I came out and got it and had, you know, the cork had erupted through the capsule. So I should have paid better attention to it. The point is, if you're going to be investing a lot of money into wine, you need to store it in the right way. Same if you're making wine, you want to make, you be using the metabisulfite instead of the chlorine. Now, when it comes to sulfites in wine, sulfur is a naturally occurring element, and you'll get it on grapes in any vineyard, even if there's no sulfur added.

But the point about sulfide is to preserve a wine. So once the wine, when the wine's fermenting, you don't have to add sulfur because it's, putting off carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide acts as a layer, a protective layer from the oxygen. And then once the, but once, right before you're bottling, once the aging is complete, you want to make sure that, you know, if there's any yeast in the bottle and any sugar, you don't want necessarily any additional bottle fermentation to happen, but you also don't want excessive volatile acidity or, so that's where you put in the salt. sulfur. It's a preservative. So there is a movement in the wine world to make what's called

natural wine, and those are typically made without sulfites or sulfur added. And we can talk about that more. But, you know, sulfite is to preserve a wine to prevent it from becoming like vinegar. And how does it become like vinegar? Well, like that bottle of wine example I mentioned where, you know, the cork popped out. Well, that connection in the neck of the bottle where the cork is supposed to be sealing it's probably not as good anymore you get more oxygen in the oxygen in with the wine can eventually lead to spoilage if you've ever had a half open bottle wine on the counter and tried it two or three days later there's a handful of wines in the world that can actually last that long and improve but most wines you know sure two or three days it will

taste like vinegar yeah and vinegar is acetic acid one of the steps between ethel alcohol and acetic acid is this stuff called acid aldehyde and my dad's wine also had heavy notes of that as well because he would age his wine in these barrels that were just really porous. And I was an organic chemist, and I said, I got to find out what's wrong with this wine of yours. And so I took it and put it on a gas chromatograph and found a big spike at acid aldehyde, which also, by the way, for people out there, since this is a medical show, if you have a flushing syndrome, a lot of those folks can't metabolize anthonyl.

alcohol all the way and they'll get stuck at acid aldehyde and they'll get build up of acid aldehyde and they'll get flushing or they'll feel ill also antibuse that medication that people take to prevent themselves from drinking will make them sick because they end up with an abundance of acid aldehyde so you know it's a sort of a mid mid place or you know a mid metabolite of ethyl alcohol. I want to ask you about storing wine because you said we need to store it properly, but we didn't say how to do that. But before we get to that, I got to ask you, so when you pour wine for someone and they take

the little sip and they smell it and they, you know, everyone does this, I think probably a lot of the salmalliers are like, yeah, right, like you know what you're doing. But, you know, everybody tries to look like they're, and then they go, nah, send it back. how pissed are you guys when people do that and what do you do with that then can you turn around and then sell it again right that's a good question i get that question uh with some frequency and uh my usual answer is uh well the cooks are going to be happy yeah but no uh if the wine is still good we'll try to sell it and you know if someone doesn't want it we'll take it back it has happened dr steve before where i presented a wine to someone and asked them you know to judge whether it's correct and they said it's

fine. And then it just didn't smell right to me and I kind of took it to the side and had a little taste myself and I went back to them. I said, you know, I think your Bob is corked. Let me pour you this other one and see what you think. And they're like, oh, wow, that's interesting because back to the top of corked.

A corked wine, you can still drink it. It's just not as fresh and impressive as a non-corked wine would be. What it would taste like is someone just put like a wet blanket on top of it. You smell it. It's not as aromatic as it should. be you kind of get the sense there's something good happening there but that you know maybe you're

not familiar with what corkiness is and so you don't know that that wet cardboard taste you're getting isn't supposed to be part of the wine and it's not yeah um and you know there's that trichloral anisol I mentioned that's could be present in parts of you know a lot very very small amounts or very very high amounts and some people can detect it in smaller amounts than others so um so are you allowed as a Somalié to taste their wine. That's a good question. So each restaurant has its own tradition. And I would say in 99% of the restaurants, well, 99% of the restaurants probably don't have a sommelier, but 95% of them that do in the United States today, they let the host taste it first. There's a handful of extremely high-end restaurants mainly on the coast, San Francisco,

in New York, that part of the process of presenting the bottle of wine is making sure that the wine is correct in Paris, too. So if you ordered this 1982 Chateau-Bishevel, Dr. Steve, I'd present it to you, take it to the wine station, and taste it to make it sure it's correct before presenting it to you. And if it's not, then I'll go tell you this bottle's not correct. I'm going to get you a new one. Yeah, sort of like communion.

Because the priest's true, I taste the wine first. There you go. Yeah, because if I'm paying for a good bottle of wine and it's not right, And I wouldn't know. I'd like you to taste it first. So I didn't know if that was something people did. Will you try it and make sure it's right? A lot of times guests will ask, but the general tradition is to ask the person who's paying for it to know.

And that can be hard, you know, it can be hard even as an experienced person like me, like I said. Or like you mentioned there in that study, Dr. Steve, like someone says, a white wine's a red wine. And they're anologist. That's their job every day. So to ask someone who just has a bottle of wine. a week on Friday night. That is a lot to ask of them. Yeah. So let's get back to storing wine. How should we, how should we store it properly? Because we've got a lot of listeners. A lot of people drink wine out there. Lady Diagnosis is notorious for certain aspects of her life that are

wine related. And, you know, but I think a lot of us just buy a box wine, stick it in the fridge. That's a good way to do it, honestly, because those box wines have the collapsible bags inside them, so it keeps you from having wine that's been exposed to air. Are there any good box wines while we're on that subject? There are good box wines. I don't have any particular recommendations for it right now, but the quality of all wine is better than it was 30 years ago. If we go back 30 years ago to the Keontes and the wicker baskets, you know, a lot of wines, people didn't really know much about wine in that time. The

Hardy Burgundy That was my big one. Gallaudergy. You know, some of those were goods from what I've read. But, you know, wine, of course, is a big part of the tradition in Europe

and it's more of a newcomer to the American tradition. Of course, we had Prohibition. And there was some wine made in Prohibition by people like the Christian brothers who made brandy and still do. And then after Prohibition ended,

The U.S. was a pretty hard-drinking country in terms of hard spirits. You think about the show Madman, a lot of Cosmos, and then in the 80s, cosmo, or Manhattan's, and a lot of smoking at work and having intercourse with your secretary, too, back then. While drinking. Since you brought that show up, it's amazing. I recommend everyone watch that show because it's incredible how much things have actually changed, and not that long of a time, because you're like to say, And this stuff would never happen today.

No, no. But anyway. But anyway. So point being is in Europe, they weren't exporting very much wine in like the 60s and 50s. Some certain regions were. And so, you know, as with any industry that is less invested, you might let a few things go. And maybe they had dirty sellers, dirty tanks, which meant dirty wine. So to circle back around the last 30 years, winemaking practices worldwide have just

gotten a lot cleaner, cleaner tanks, and that means better, fresher wines, even these box wines. There's nothing wrong with a box wine whatsoever. The main thing is just to get a wine that you enjoy and appreciate yourself. And when we talk, you know, sometimes people ask like, well, do you have to have white wine with fish, red wine with meat? If that's what you like, then do it. But if you want a big bottle of red with some salmon, go for it. If you want a Cheblee or Sauvignon Blanc with a steak, go for it. I mean, do what you want. How do they chintz on the box wines making it? Do they just use massively produced grapes, or do they just not ferment it as long?

That's a good question. So fermentation would probably be, you can't really chintz on that per se. But, you know, let's take the example of... We could start from concentrate instead of starting from grapes. Or, right, or where the grapes are sourced. California's Central Valley, where land is cheaper, versus Napa Valley, where land is upwards of a million dollars an acre sometimes. You know, what do you pay per ton?

And then the physical tanks, you're fermenting them in instead of being what you might think of if you're someone who's actually looked at it. It could look like an industrial fertilizer plant. I mean, it could be 500,000 gallons. It could be 30 feet across or more where they make these bulk wines. But that, again, doesn't mean that it's bad. I think there's a misconception that, you know, there's a direct linkage between price and quality. Of course, sometimes you get what you pay for, but sometimes wine's overpriced, too. There's that famous wine, the two-buck, Chuck, the Charles Shaw from Trader Joe's, which I think the price may have gone up.

There's no Trader Joe's where I live, but the point being is very drinkable, nice wine for only $2. Yeah. When my wife and I first started going out, I would buy her really expensive wine. I'd get her these cases, and then I found out it didn't really matter. I could buy her $4 Tisdale wine, and she'd be just as happy. So, of course, I did that and saved my money for other things. Like vacations to Primeland. There you go.

But for storing wine, since Dr. Steve, that was your initial question. Oh, yes. Yes. If you're going to store it for more than a couple weeks, the general rule of thumb is keeping it under 70 degrees. If you're going to start building a cellar and storing it for years or decades or half centuries, you want to keep it. about 55 degrees and about 60 to 70% humidity and also no light and no, you know, motion. So really the worst place to put it, it would be on top of your refrigerator in the kitchen because you've got the motion of the fridge and the heat, right, because heat rises or, you know,

I've even seen pictures of homes where there's a wine rack above the stove, you know, with a little slots. So, you know, yeah, if you would just leave it there for two, three days, two, three weeks, no problem. Or just to look cool. Right, yeah. If you want to look cool, you should get a bottle of the Dr. Steve's... An empty bottle. Gout juice. Yeah, that's true.

Okay, so those little wine-chilling little things that look like refrigerators, those are okay. Yes, definitely under the counter. There's some that actually moderate humidity and some that don't. The cheaper ones tend to only be temperature and not humidity controlled, so if you wanted to spend a little more. So why do you have to be concerned with humidity? if it's in a bottle. Well, that's a good question. So if it's in a bottle with a cork,

the humidity of the humidity will help keep the cork moist because if you have a real dry environment, the cork will dry out, say we're in like a Sonoran desert situation. But then there's a lot of wine nowadays with screw caps too. Yeah, I was going to say, but also that thing that goes over the cork. Doesn't that kind of preserve it from the moisture? No. A long term, no.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's the foil. Yeah, so I... Screw caps are popular. We started seeing in home winemaking move towards synthetic corks because there's been a, I guess, I mean, cork is a natural product. It's tree bark. There are only so many trees. We must be getting to a point where that's maybe an issue as far as supply is concerned.

Well, if I were here representing the cork industry, I would say cork is a green product because it's renewable. Yes. Because you can skin it off the cork oak and you're not cutting the tree down. and then another, how many ever years later, seven to ten years later, maybe more, come back and harvest again and again and again versus, you know, plastics. But they don't use plastic corks as much anymore just because the seal wasn't good. But what they do sometimes is they found ways to use more of the cork than they used to and that you may have seen agglomerated cork where it's just little pieces of cork all jam together

with some glue as opposed to just one solid shot of it. Well, I just figured there would be a limited supply. I have cork because how many trees can you have? But I guess the earth is a big place. You can have a lot of trees. Most of the cork trees are in Portugal and Spain too. So again, if I were a representative of the cork industry, which I'm not, I'd say that's supporting that indigenous economy. Okay. So corks are okay. All right. Very good. So can you tell us a little bit about just wine tasting. How should we get better at tasting wine rather than just guzzling it like Tacey does

or Lady Diagnosis Oh no I don't guzzle Okay so how could well Just to take it first and foremost to be Taste more wine If you live in a place with a wine store That does wine tastings on Saturdays A lot of times these stores will have

Representatives of the wine wholesalers They are pouring six 10 12 wines And you can just taste them and see what you like Or you can create a club with your friends, people from work. Don't do this at work, but you know, a week. Well, let's you own a bar.

You can, you know, I'll meet on the weekend once a month and rotate houses and bring, you know, the appropriate number of bottles of wine and you could have a theme for each month like California whites, New Zealand whites, French whites, and just start to learn more. And, of course,

listening to shows like this would help do. This show doesn't help anybody do anything. Can I ask a question? Of course. Oh, okay. What's the difference between port and wine? Is it just aged longer?

Port is a type of fortified wine. Okay. It is made in Portugal, and it's wine that has typically a grape-neutral brandy added to it to make it stronger, fortified. And like many discoveries in wine, it was probably done by accident. And how it probably happened was the wine was put into a barrel to ferment, and it happened. to be either topped up with some brandy accidentally or there was some brandy in the barrel. And the way it's done now, the fermentation is allowed to go partway and then the brandies added due to the fact the higher alcohol is in the wine, it kills the yeast that are causing the fermentation.

And that means some of the sugars that normally would have converted to alcohol are still in wine, which is why port tends to be sweeter too. So sweeter and stronger. That's why we serve it in smaller glasses because you don't need as much. so that's a port is one type of fortified wine there are other fortified wines as well such as madeira talk a little bit then since you brought it up about sweet and dry and wet and those different characteristics because just because something sweet it still could be dry and sweet right so that's a good question yes so sometimes people mistake a wine that tastes very much like ripe fruit for being sweet so if you have flavors of ripe red fruits you might think well this is sweet but it could be more dry and here I might think of something like a beaujolet

but sweetness you can sometimes feel so maybe I should break my nose so I can start to feel these wines better but no I don't really want to do that sweet wines you'll see there's all types of sweet wines even some chardonnays some very popular chardonnays have some additional sweetness to it There's a famous Chardonnay brand that actually they had a stuck fermentation, which is where they had a problem in this.

I'm sure if you're a home winemaker, Dr. Sieve, you know about this problem in the winemaking process for whatever reason. It's usually you're not feeding the yeast properly. So they run out of food. They need more than just sugar. So they didn't know what to do. And they decided, well, I'm just going to mix it together with some wine that had been completely fermented. and they sold it, and it was a little bit sweeter than any. This was back in the early 80s.

Wine had been before, and people loved it because we like sweet things. We eat candy. We eat soda. It's good. Yeah, and I can certainly feel sugar. If I accidentally drink sweet tea, you know, southern sweet tea, which I can't stand, I can feel it on my mouth. It feels sort of round and, I don't know, gooey sort of.

There's a weight to it, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's interesting. So I could imagine drinking a dry white wine that might have, you know, apricot flavors or whatever and thinking that for being sweet. But when we say sweet and wine, we're really talking about sugar, or am I? We should be. Okay. Yes, and what dry means is not sweet.

So there's a dry, know what we call residual sugar. That's sugar. That's where the yeast is eaten everything and then drop to the bottom and, and left no sugar behind. Correct. And since you mentioned that, just for the listeners out there, if you're not sure what fermentation is, what fermentation is, alcoholic fermentation is you take sugar and yeast, and it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. So that's why that carbon dioxide is produced.

And that's actually how bottle fermented carbonation, such as is found in champagne, produces bubbles. So what champagne is, is a still wine that's been bottled, and then you add a little bit, bit of yeast and then you add a little bit of the lique du tirage a sugar solution to cause in a bottle of wine that's still fermentation again right now that's pretty uh that was invented supposedly by the monk dom perignon and very hand intensive labor intensive so you can make carbonated wine in other methods there's a charmont process where you have a big tank and you do the exact same thing just in a big tank and then you bottle it, or you can actually just make a still wine and then pump CO2 into it like you would for beer or beer or soda.

Yeah, that's interesting. So I tried making sparkling wine once, and I made an apple wine, and then we had to add sugar and a little bit of yeast to it. We made a solution and dumped it in. You know, you have to decork it and then add that and then put the new cork on that you can and then use the wire to hold it down because the pressure of the fermentation will knock the regular cork out. Yeah.

It'll knock a regular cork out of there and you'll have wine all over every place. And now there are, there's one process where they turn the neck of the bottle up and then they'll freeze it and then pop that. That's disgorgement. So tell us about that. That's a good question. So the way you described it, one cork and then another, in champagne they do, a cork, actually they use crown caps.

So after they add the yeast and the sugar, they'll put another crown cap pound. That's just like a bottle cap. And then they go through a step of called remouage, where this is a bottle that's laid on its side in racks, and there's someone that goes through there, he's probably or she doing it right now as we speak, going through these caves and champagne,

giving these a quarter turn, and making them move slightly downwards. And over the course of several years, it goes from about horizontal to about, you know, diagonal and that means what that does is it takes all the yeast that have been added to the bottle to create the second fermentation towards the neck because they want to pop out that yeast that had been put in the bottle to create the secondary fermentation out of the bottle before it hits the market and they try to sell it for $500 a bottle or $50.

So you don't have the sentiment from the secondary fermentation. And then they take the sediment out from the secondary fermentation, that's called disgorgement. So what they do then is they actually put the neck of the bottle through this freezing solution. It's some sort of chemical that's not water, so it can get below 32 degrees, and you freeze the neck of the bottle, and that makes all the sediment from the secondary fermentation hardened. So when you pop it out, and it does pop out because there's carbon dioxide there, they just eject it out, top it up with a little more wine, and then you put the cage and the mushroom cap in there. It's crazy.

Wow. I figured that out the first time. They must add a lot of time on their hands. I've got, we have some questions from, we've only got about 15 minutes left, and we want to try this wine, too. Do you mind answering some questions from our listeners? I'd be glad to. Okay. I have no idea what these are, so.

Dr. Steve, is Craig calling from Scottsdale, and I have a question for you about wine. It has to do with red wine and goes back to the mills. 90s, when there was an article written about the French paradox, how the French people ate all the highly saturated food, yet they had a very minimal amount of heart disease. And they attributed to the drinking of red wine, and they really didn't take much else into consideration. Yeah, it's a long question, but that's, so the French paradox, you've, Do you have anything to say about that? I've got a couple of studies that I happen to pull to talk about that.

Well, my first response would be is I was lucky enough to go to France last year in April for about a week, and I actually lost weight. So I experienced the French paradox myself. But what I realized is the French are very good at dining. The Americans are very good at eating. So I would go to lunch, and they would make time out of their day to sit down and talk to you for an hour and a half at lunch. But then at 4.30, I was driving a lot. You couldn't just stop by a 7-Eleven and get a big gulp. They don't have as many gas stations, period.

And then where they do, they stop and have a cup of coffee. They don't have just food available everywhere. One night I was driving. I don't have pretzel cheese dogs. You know, I want to find a place to eat. It was just harder to find a place to eat. But they're good at dining. I can attest to that as well.

My wife and I. So they enjoy the dining. Yes. The whole thing. We're in Ciches, Espagna, which is near Barcelona, and we were starving, and it was 9 o'clock, and none of the restaurants were open yet, because they all open. And we were banging on the door. Will you please feed us now?

And we felt like the old folks going to a dang, you know, early bird special or something, because, you know, finally they're like, yeah, we'll feed you. It's 9.30. At night? At night, yeah. Wow. Yeah, it was very interesting. I realized when I was there that they really have the whole lifestyle thing figured out

because, you know, they rest during the day and then they work, you know, until later. And then they go out and eat. And then the clubs, even on a weeknight, it'll open up at one in the morning. And, you know, and I was sitting at a bar and saw the trash guys coming at midnight. It's genius. Why would you do that in the heat of the day? Do it at midnight. And then I got home, I said, we need to go on the European model.

And I looked up some statistics and found out that Spain in particular at that time had the lowest productivity of any civilized country. So, you know, you trade that. But they're happy. There's a good. Yes. And that's not nothing. No. That's very important.

I have a study from the European, wow, surprise. Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the effect of red wine and red grape extract on blood lipids, hemistatic factors, and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease. I'm just going to read the conclusion because we don't have time to go through the whole study. But says moderate red wine consumption for four weeks is associated with desirable changes in HDLC, which is your good cholesterol, so it's raising your good cholesterol, and fibrenogen, which is, you know, it's involved in clotting, or you don't want too much of that. compared with drinking water with or without red grape extract

because we've all heard that, well, it's just the red grape extract that makes the difference, the resveratrol. The impact of wine on the measured cardiovascular risk factors thus seems primarily explained by an alcohol effect. Thank you, Dr. Steve. Good news, but yeah, it's very interesting. And then there's another one that showed that, when they

so now that this is science de-alcoholized red wine containing known amounts of resveratrol suppresses atherosclerosis in other words clogs in the heart in hyperclastrolemic rabbits without affecting plasma lipid levels

now that's an interesting finding because they took the alcohol out and found that the resveratrol extract actually decreased the amount of deposits of plaque on, now these are in rabbits, so we've got to see this in humans, without actually changing their

lipid levels. So we've all known for some time that it's not just lipid levels that cause cardiovascular risk, because if you take a statin drug and reduce someone's bad cholesterol by a certain amount, you'll reduce their risk of heart attack and stroke by a certain amount. If you reduce their cholesterol, their LDL cholesterol specifically with other medications doesn't change the outcome the way that statins do. So it can't just be cholesterol alone. There's something else going on. It could be anti-inflammatory. It could be anti-plate. We don't know. Still don't know, but it's very interesting. So moderate amount of wine appears to be good for you. I've always counseled my patients when they have. That's true.

High cholesterol, when they ask me what can I do about my heart attack risk, increasing your exercise, stopping smoking, getting your blood sugars under control, getting your blood pressure under control, and, you know, drinking four ounces of red wine a day. If you're a teetotaler, four ounces of red grape juice might do as well. Increasing soluble fiber like oatmeal or oat bran, that kind of thing. methyl cellulose a.k.a. Uh-oh. Citra cell. Oh, where is my drop? I changed this thing. Oh, there it is. Citrosan.

Citrosse. Citrosse. Citruset. All right. All right. All right. Enough from that. No, no, no. Okay, Dr. C. So, and those kinds of things. Those lifestyle management things, but wine is certainly a part of that. So, okay.

Now I know why you've got the citrus cell bumper sticker in your car out there. Well, when we first start, started the show back in 2005. We mentioned testosterone and citrus cell every single show because people were worried about their biggest problems about their testicular function and they were worried about their bowel movements. All right, let's see here. Let's try another question from the audience.

Hey, Dr. Steve, this is for the Somali A show. Wanted to know what his thoughts are on the alcohol content in red wine. it seems that it keeps going up. And the bigger and bigger reds are just pretty much tasting more boozy than actual, you know, grapes. What do you think about that? Is he right about that? I've not noticed this. He is right.

There's definitely been a trend in the last 20 years to more extraction and bigger-styled wines. And how that comes about is the higher alcohol is by letting a grape stay on the vine longer to get more ripe flavor. it also ends up getting more sugar that could be converted into alcohol. There's other factors at play too, such as acid levels and the grape typically go down as the grape matures and really the best thing for wine

is to be in balance. You can always add acid to a wine during the wine-making process. That's completely legitimate. Some parts of the world historically have had to add sugar to the pressed grape juice to help bring more alcohol to the wine,

say it was a cold vintage or a northern location. But there's actually been a counter trend away from the bigger, boosier wines, those 16% cabernets and zinfandals, to more moderately styled 12 and a half to 13% wines. And, you know, if you talk to someone at your local wine store, they should be able to help you find that out. But there are other wines out there you can find that would be counter examples. Okay.

very interesting I'm going to play you something going way back in the Opian Anthony days okay let's do it I one of the things that I did and if if you want to find this

on the internet you can just go to YouTube and put in suck my Pino it's S-U-K-M-A-I-P-I-N-O-T and this video will come up and we've only got a couple of minutes I'm just going to play their reaction to me sending them

homemade wine. Dr. Mengelah. Here's some wine. He listens, Jimmy. Good. Stop sending people fucking alcohol that you stepped on

your own awful corn-ridden feet. He probably connects like cyst juice. Oh, shit. Nobody has enough. He lets it ferment. Lance wine.

Right. When you come in. Okay, so you get the picture. Yeah, it's funny. So, anyway, I have some wine that I made at that time. And this is actually, I named it cyst juice after them because this was after the suck my pino. I'm going to let you and Lady Diagnosis try it.

This has been stored on its side, but the cork was a two-year cork, and that is, what, 10 years old? I think that's 2008. 2009. 2009. So, yeah, right at 10 years. So it's really eight years past where it should have been. I just kept it as a memento. I have several others, but all of those I only had one bottle.

This one I had two. And this was a meritage. What in the heck is a merit? I called it meritage for years, and then I was corrected by somebody. It is a blend of different, typically red wine grapes, specifically, usually Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franque, Petit Verdot, the major Bordeaux varieties. This is an aromatic wine. I can smell very grapey, doesn't it?

I can smell it from here. Right, you don't have to. So I think it's not corked because a corked wine, you wouldn't be able to smell it as aromatic. Interesting. There's a lot of nuances on the nose. You get that Concord grape quality. Oh, there we go. Turn down the lights.

Can I get a straw? So they are now. Somelier Carl has got his nose in the glass, and he's. looking intently. Oh, now he's tasting it. Oh, here we go. The nose is better than the power. There you go. So the nose, you get

a little bit mixture of the grapiness, red fruits, a little bit of brewfruits, mainly red fruits, and just a hint of a little bit of cardboard box on the nose. Do you get that the diagnosis? Absolutely, yes. And then you taste it, and it's not totally in balance.

We get a lot of sweetness, yeah, so it didn't improve with age. But it's not a failed wine. It's just, well, no, I'm going to take that as a win. It's not a failed wine. You hear that, you assholes. I would drink it, Dr. Steve. Really? Perfectly made cist wine.

There you go. Thank you very much. Must be from the good cists. Thank you. All right. So let's see. We've got a couple other questions. Oh, yeah, this one might be good.

Let's see. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Ken from Egan, South Carolina. I have a question for the episode coming up with your Master Sommelier. Ask him how he feels about studies that have shown that Master Sommelier. Wait, nobody knows how to pronounce that word. I told you. It's really a tough one.

The other guy called you a Somalian. It could not tell the difference between 10 buck chuck and $50 wines or wines that have sat out for a couple of days after the court's been pulled. I'd like to get his opinion on that. Thanks. Fluid. We kind of hit this already, but we've got two minutes. It wouldn't hurt to... So first of all, I'm actually not a master's sommelier. This master's omelier is out there would certainly want that to be known. And, you know, anyone can be fooled. Even Tom Brady throws an interception, and LeBron James doesn't make every shot. So,

but with study, you can definitely learn more about wine. Yes, anyone can be fooled. The black classes, the study that Dr. Steve mentioned, but if you spend day after day training your nose, training your palate, learning about things, I can promise you you will get better at wine identification and wine appreciation. Yeah, absolutely. And in the end, for us, it's just fine things that you like. Exactly. That's it. So we've had... That doesn't give you a headache. Carl Kazak's from Primland, which is in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. Take the last minute. it to plug the place. And thank you so much for coming all the way down here to talk to us about wine. And it is the number five resort in the United States, number one in the southeast. And it's

ranked internationally as well, right? Yes, it's a very, very nice resort, very high end. We get lots of ratings, high ratings. But more important to us than that is just the quality of the people that are there both the employees our team there uh the guests we have there such as dr steve and our owners it's really it's meant to be a luxury retreat in a natural setting it's on many thousands of acres you can hunt golf fish or just do nothing at all and sit back and drink some wine ride ATVs right ATVs exactly sit at the uh at the fire pit at the fire pit yeah lady diagnosis has been there and uh we love to go there we need to make reservations for uh um for Memorial Day, if there are any left.

But I can attest that the staff is second to none. They feel like family. You know, we walk into the saloon. Where they've got a saloon, they'll have Stevie Bar playing bluegrass. And, you know, the woman that runs a place, Deborah, just comes and hugs us. And we just feel, you know, it's so nice. It's so nice. It's such a great place.

We're completely out of time. Thank you so much for coming. Carl Kazaks from Primland. You can find the Primland Resort at primland.com in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. Thanks always go to Lady Diagnosis. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Tepp, Lewis Johnson, Paul Offcharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley,

whose early support of this show has never gone unappreciated by us. listen to our serious xm show on the faction talk channel serious xm channel 103 saturdays at 8 p m eastern sundays at 5 p m eastern on demand and other time at jim mcclure's pleasure many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy go to our website at dr steve com for schedules and podcasts and other crap until next time check your stupid nuts for lumps quit smoking get off your asses and get some exercise we'll see you in one week for the next edition of weird Thank you.