A new discovery of mine, the American Association of Wine Economists, takes this further, noting recent studies from the National Academy of Sciences, showing fairly conclusively that people ascribe better qualities to wine that has a higher price attached to it. In it’s own study, the AAWE found absolutely no correlation between wine price and quality.

I for one am not terrribly surprised. Wine knowledge is generally so weak, and shrouded in mystery, snobbery, and jargon, that the average consumer has nothing to go on but price.

This is the rough, written version of my talk for Interesting 2008, which I gave on Saturday June 21st (under my actual name, James Bridle). The final version was probably somewhat different, and there will be actual video soon, but in the mean time here’s some words and slides, with some proper sources at the end… Ta to everyone who was there on the day, and especially to Russell, who made it all happen.

Hello. Some of you probably read that Clay Shirky piece that went round the internet a few weeks ago, where he talked about gin being the ‘enabling technology’ of the 18th century. He argued, in part, that gin enabled the industrial revolution by allowing us all to go and get hammered at the end of the working day, and thereby bear the hideous working conditions of the time - cramped in city slums and unpleasant factories. It’s a good theory, but I believe there’s a much larger story about how our whole civilisation is based to some extent on our desire for booze - one that goes back even further than human civilisation itself.

First, a personal story. A few years ago I was living in Camden, and I had a lovely garden, and at the end of the garden was a Hackberry tree.

I know nothing about hackberry trees except they produce a small fruit somewhere between a berry and a plum. All summer I watched these things growing on the branch, and by the end of the summer they were ripe, and falling onto my concrete patio, and rotting. I was moving out of the flat, so I decided to clear up the garden a bit, and as I was sweeping up all the decomposing hackberries I noticed a very distinctive smell - sort of heavy, and sour. I recognised it as the smell you get the morning after a particularly good party, when people have spilled a lot of beer into the carpet, or more particularly the smell of a brewery when the beer is fermenting in the vats. The hackberries on my patio were fermenting, and turning to booze, all by themselves. ‘Lucky birds’, I thought.

After that, I went off to the South of France and helped out with a wine harvest, working in a big cellar in the Languedoc. There I learned a lot more about fermentation, and why the grape is nature’s most perfect creation.

The grape - every single one - is basically a machine for making wine. Very little is required for fermentation to occur, just sugars and yeast, and grapes have an almost perfect balance of chemicals. When the moment is right, the yeasts on their skins and floating about in the air, start to feed on the sugars in the grapes juice, and turn them into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

All man really does is select the right grapes, and the right yeast, and ensure the right environmental conditions to produce the kind of alcoholic grape juice we’re partial to: the grapes and the yeasts do pretty much everything else.

And it turns out that this simple reaction has some really interesting evolutionary background to it. There hasn’t been a lot of research in this area - surprisingly little, I think, because if I was a biologist this is pretty much where I’d be at - but it does appear that fruits developed the ability to turn into booze - evolutionary scientists would say they self-selected for this - as one of a number of cues for ripeness.

In the wild, there’s pretty intense competition to spread your seed around, so when a fruit is ripe it wants to get eaten as quickly as possible and be deposited as far away as possible by a nice neighbourhood frugivore like a bird or a primate, so it shows off its ripeness with various cues such as changing skin colour, and fleshiness, and some pretty obvious smells. But it turns out that while primates have a pretty rubbish sense of smell compared to most animals, we’re pretty good at sensing ethanol, and when we get a nose for it, bits of our brain start hammering away. One of my favourite expressions - “one sniff of the barmaid’s apron” - turns out to have some basis in fact.

So when a fruit is ripe for dispersal, it starts to ferment - very slightly in some cases, more so in others, but to some degree in pretty much all fruit species. And all the primates downwind smell that booze and come running, which is good for the fruit and the seed, because if it falls, uneaten, close to the tree, it hasn’t done much for its evolutionary future.

Now, a side effect of this is that birds, who don’t smell the ethanol but do see that pretty, ripe fruit hanging on the branch, also get stuck in. I noticed this in Camden, and it’s been documented elsewhere.

This is the world’s drunkest known bird. It’s a Cedar Waxwing, native to North America. A few years ago, someone saw a couple of these fall out of the sky, and took them to the nearest bio lab, where they were dissected, and in their crops were found the half-digested remains of a good meal of Hawthorn berries. The berries were found to contain a noticeable alcohol content - they’d overwintered on the trees, and when the frosts melted in the spring, they started to ferment - and the livers of the birds were found to be pretty sodden too. Not human-levels of drunkenness, but enough to make these two pass out in mid-air.

What some scientists believe is that, because of this association of booze and fresh fruit - and our primate ancestors had diets that consisted primarily of ripe fruit - primates developed an evolutionary preference for booze. It became associated with a nutritional reward: find booze, and you’re finding something good to eat.

So it’s no surprise that improving our ability to make booze is one of the very first things humans did when we learned to do pretty much anything at all.

If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, which I highly recommend, you’ll know that civilisation started when we started to domesticate crops. We realised it was easier to cultivate grains - wheat and barley, mostly - than spend our whole time trying to gather them in the wild. But there’s a significant argument about what drove this realisation - what were we doing with these crops?

Well, the obvious answer is that we were grinding these grains to make bread. But there’s a good argument that our cultivation of grains was driven not by hunger but by thirst. Early forms of beer, which were most likely a sort of fermented gruel, were incredibly nutritious, and some scientists have suggested that we first settled down and started raising crops in order to facilitate brewing. So my argument for In Vino Civitas - In Booze, Civilisation - starts with this idea that humans drank ourselves into civilisation.

Early beer was pretty rough. This is a decoration from a lapis lazuli cylinder from the Royal Cemetary at Ur, in modern-day Iraq, around 2500BC, and it shows a couple drinking beer through straws, because the beer was unfiltered, and had loads of organic stuff floating in it.

But ever since then, we’ve been working to improve the technology of brewing and wine-making.

The really big deal came around the 8th century AD, when Muslim chemists discovered distilling, a highly technical process which allowed us to pass over the natural limit of 14% or so alcohol, when the yeasts die off, and produce ever stronger drink. And this discovery was one of the major revelations of the alchemical experiments of the time. It’s where we get the word ‘alcohol’ and it’s the basis of pretty much all scientific discovery up to the present day.

Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the Royal Society, had his first scientific success in the refinement of the hydrometer, which measures the alcohol content of beer and wine. Johannes Kepler published ‘The New Stereography of Wine Barrels’ in 1613, developing a new calculus which he later used to describe the elliptical orbit of the planets.

As Clay Shirky said, cheap gin was a pretty good way of getting through the day when you worked in a pre-Health & Safety cotton mill, but there’s a corollary to this.

Beer, as well as spirits, allowed us to crowd together into cities where the water was foul and undrinkable, and it allowed us set off on long sea voyages of exploration and conquest. That’s what Hogarth is getting at in the print above: Beer Street is the companion piece to Gin Lane, and depicts a happy British populace fuelled by Beer, whereas Gin Street is basically a xenophobic attack on Europe, and the Dutch in particular. These two opportunities - urbanisation and exploration, have fuelled all major human activity since the renaissance.

There’s a lot more to this story, of course, and I didn’t get a chance to talk about my recent experiments with homebrew, but that’s probably for the best. So I’ll stop.

Cheers!

• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (Clay Shirky, 2008)
• Ethanol, Fruit Ripening, and the Historical Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory (Dudley, Integrative and Comparative Biology 2004 44(4):315-323)
• Suspected Ethanol Toxicosis in Two Wild Cedar Waxwings (S. D. Fitzgerald, J. M. Sullivan and R. J. Everson, Avian Diseases, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1990), pp. 488-490
• Guns, Germs & Steel (Jared Diamond, 1998)
• Archaeological Parameters for the Beginnings of Beer (Thomas W. Kavanagh, Ph.D, Brewing Techniques, September/October 1994.)
• History of Alcohol and Drinking around the World (Hanson, David J., Preventing Alcohol Abuse: Alcohol, Culture and Control. Wesport, CT: Praeger, 1995)
• Johannes Kepler and his Contribution to Applied Mathematics (Franz Pichler, Linz)
• Beer Street and Gin Lane at Wikipedia.

Bird image from Fortphoto, under Creative Commons. Plant images by Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé from Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany, via Wikimedia Commons.

For Team 12’s totally awesome web presentation. Official page and voting here. Thank you!

Courgette Carpaccio

• Courgettes
• A lemon
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

These courgettes were chosen for the main to help cut through some of the heaviness of the eggs. They are light, refreshing and add a really cool bright green colour.

Start with a courgette and a veg peeler (or mandolin). Keep peeling the same spot on the courgette until you start getting fairly wide, but really thin slices. Arrange these on a plate in a row until it’s covered. Drizzle a little olive oil over them, then a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper. Next, back to the veg peeler to create a new layer to overlay on the plate. Then more dressing. Continue until you have enough (I used 8 slices per person, but it depends how thin the slices are… or how hungry the persons are), and leave in a fridge for at least an hour for the flavours to develop.

Salad Cream

• Four egg yolks
• White wine vinegar
• Four table spoons of single cream
• Cayenne pepper to taste
• Pinch of salt
• Pinch of white pepper

The salad cream was a last minute panic addition to add some sauce for the egg. Salad cream seemed to continue the neglected British food theme nicely. It’s based on recipe from the original champion of cookery, Mrs Beeton. Don’t think Heinz. Brilliantly it tastes a bit like Hollandaise.

Add the cream, egg yolks and seasoning to a small pan. Give it a whisk to mix and place on a low heat. Keep whisking, whilst adding a desert spoon of vinegar. You now have to continue whisking whilst retaining on the heat, this can take a while but if you whack up the heat you get vinegary scrambled eggs. If not, you’ll end up with a sauce the thickness of double cream. Give it a taste, Rosalind of the cookery school got me out of a pickle when I’d added too much vinegar; an extra pinch of salt seems to reduce the effect, cheers Rosalind! Leave it to cool before serving.

Scotched Eggs (makes 4)

• ½ kilo of Pork shoulder
• ¼ kilo of Pork belly
• Seven large eggs
• A handful of sage, chopped finely
• 2 teaspoons of ground mace
• A good amount of pepper
• A desert spoon of salt
• A capful of Scotch
• A packet of breadcrumbs

Yes, it’s scotched, not scotch. The act of slicing meat finely is scotching, hence scotched eggs. I got far to into this in the run up to the competition, discovering Fortnum and Masons invented them at the turn of last century. So they have nothing to do with Scotland. However, in honour of Cooking with Booze, I have added some of its favourite export.

Start with the pork. Remove any skin, and immediately cover it in oil and a (un)healthy amount of salt. Place in a very hot oven for 20 minutes ish, by which time you will have finished preparing the pork just in time for a Chefs treat of amazing crackling!

Anyway, back to the main event. You can get skin removed and meat minced by your butcher, though I use a 1950’s Spong mincer, which gives a great coarse texture. Put the minced pork in a bowl and add an egg, the seasoning, spices, the Scotch and vitally, a good handful of breadcrumbs. Lots of people think breadcrumbs will make the meat drier; in fact they retain the fat as it cooks and keep it all moist and porky. Get involved with your hands and squidge it all together. Leave covered in the fridge for the flavours to infuse.
Meanwhile soft boil four large eggs for about 4 ½ minutes. Immediately dunk in cold water to stop them cooking and shell very carefully. Prepare an egg wash with the remaining eggs and a plate of breadcrumbs ready for rolling.

Now for the best bit! Take a small fistful of meat and pat out into a ½ cm thick saucer sized disk on your palm. Place a boiled egg in the middle of this patty and bring your fingers up to enclose the egg with meat. Smooth over the seams until no longer visible, the more care you take here, the less likely they’ll split in the pan. Gently ‘throw’ from palm to palm to sphereise your porked egg. Repeat for the other eggs. Next roll each one in egg wash followed by breadcrumbs to coat.

To cook them place an inch of oil in a frying pan and heat until a cube of bread just sizzles. Place the eggs in and immediately start spooning hot oil over them with a metal ladle. Keep this up, rolling them occasionally for at least 15 minutes. This way you should cook the pork through without burning and end up with golden brown eggs.

Serve, just cooked, on a plate with the courgette and a good dollop of salad cream. If all’s good, when you cut them open the warm yolk will run out. Yum yum.

A heads-up that I’ll be taking part in the first Food 2.0 - Nom Nom Nom event this Sunday, the 18th of May. One of the things I’ll be making is Nettle Soup, a foraged delicacy I’ve recently discovered, and some more besides, in the fine company of my mate Ed, who’ll be making some of these delicious Scotched Eggs…

Check the site for full details, and check back soon for a report.

I recently invested in an El Bulli Texturas kit from infusions4chefs. If you don’t know, El Bulli is one of the most praised restaurants in the world, and famed for the invention of molecular gastronomy, the strange mix of cookery and chemistry which produces such strange dishes as parmesan spaghetti - check this meal report for an idea of what it’s like (the UK’s Heston Blumethal is a disciple of this school).

So the first thing I tried to use it with was booze, obviously. An attempt to spherise neat rum failed completely, owing to it’s liquidity and alcoholic content, but a further attempt at spherising Bloody Mary mix and suspending it in a vodka shot was more successful.

The resulting taste, I admit, left a little to be desired, but we’re working on it. You can follow our progress in this Flickr set - and here, of course.

How could I not share this? Thanks to Ed and Ben Mason for passing it along.