 The former Chief Operating officer of Microsoft is now a lot more into food than technology; he can well afford experimentation with all the money he would have made at Microsoft. With degrees in mathematics, geophysics and space physics form UCLA as well as a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a master’s degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University, Nathan came to the attention of the food world in 2011 with “Modernist Cuisine,” a six-volume 2,400-page book on the science of cooking but came into wine news last year when he suggested that wine should not be decanted but churned in a blender for 30 seconds before pouring “When you decant you’re doing two things,” he says.”You’re taking oxygen from the air and oxidizing some of the compounds in the wine; you’re also allowing the wine to off-gas. Typically, there’s going to be sulfur dioxide, which comes from the sulfites they use. You get that out,’ he said, justifying the churning.
He now advocates adding a pinch of salt to your glass of red wine in order to smooth out and balance the flavours.
A report in Bloomberg yesterday came after the discovery during a dinner with Californian winemaker Gina Gallo singing praises of savoury tones in Cabernet Sauvignon and when she said she tried not to have them sweet or too fruity. “I said ‘I can make it more savoury. So I added a little salt to the wine, which totally changed it,” Myhrvold reportedly told Bloomberg, adding, “I start by adding just a tiny pinch of salt and what it does is to balance the flavours. With most wines, they immediately taste smoother.” He was perhaps being served Carlo Rossi red wine- a supermarket wine.
We have many different types of flavor receptors,” says Myhrvold. Unlike what most of the wine world which believes there are only four types of flavours out tongue can differentiate- salt, sweet, bitter and acid with umami (as described in Japanese food) now added as the fifth flavour, he estimates that there are 40 such flavour receptors on the tongue.
Myhrvold told Bloomberg. “When you taste something, you have this cacophony of different tastes and your brain tries to summarize that. A tiny bit of salt changes the overall impression, which is why chefs salt food.’’ But he did not mention that generally the chefs fume when you add extra salt to the food, thus creating unbalance to the dish-personal individual tastes for salt notwithstanding.
Mercifully, he clarifies that this should be restricted to young reds than the fine vintage wines. And who knows he may be right? Barely a few centuries ago we believed the earth was flat! And thanks to scientists only we know now that it is round.
Using his logic, one could add sugar through sugar syrup to make a white wine like Riesling more palatable with the spicy Indian food. How about adding some mild spices to the flavourless cheap Shiraz- the list goes on and on and on with artificial ways like this. (Incidentally, there is a list of items that may be legally added to wine during winemaking-like sugar and acid. Adding salt is not one of them- so far).
But I would strongly recommend to our readers not to try either the salt trick or the blend –not-decant trick at home-unless you are drinking Carlo Rossi red- or an equivalent wine!
Subhash Arora |