Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 Why can’t we taste sweetness in sparkling wine? How much of what we taste in wine is influenced by its appearance and our expectations? And why is copper both a savior and a threat to viticulture? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in part two of our conversation with Sonny Hodge, author of the terrific new book The Cynics Guide to Wine. You don’t need to have listened to part one from last week first, but if you missed it, go back and have a listen after you finish this one. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover whether fossilized oysters in vineyard soil can really impart marine characteristics to the wine. Why wine and food lovers should know the story of Fritz Haber, where the buttery flavor in wine comes from, how cork taint affects wine, as well as our sense of smell and perception. Why vines grown in cooler temperatures have more black pepper notes. How sniffing slower can change which aromas you detect in a wine. Why humans are more sensitive to bitter tastes than to sweet.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:14 How adding ice to whiskey opens up its aromas, and why we should focus less on wine flavors and more on describing what it truly offers.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:31 Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:13 Welcome to episode.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:15 351.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:17 On Global’s Morning Show, I recently chatted about some exciting wines to try for summer entertaining, so we started with a twist. And that’s a dealcoholised rosé that doesn’t compromise on flavour. The Incognito Rosé from Winemaker’s Cut Winery in British Columbia has all the hallmarks of a summer sipper: bright strawberries, fresh citrus and a dry, refreshing finish.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:41 Note to self: Sunny is about to contradict me using all these adjectives, but hey, what can you do? I’d pair this wine with watermelon salad, soft cheeses, or grilled shrimp skewers. There’s those shrimp again. Okay. I also have their sparkling alcohol-free piquette that has tangy pink grapefruit notes and a fizzy freshness. It would be great with grilled veggies or a charcuterie board. And no doubt those grilled shrimp skewers. You can use this wine or another alcohol-free wine in a simple mocktail. I call this one the Rosé Berry Fizz. So: three ounces of Winemaker’s Incognito Rosé de-alcoholised wine, two ounces of sparkling water, a few fresh raspberries and ice. I will put the ingredients and recipe for this in the show notes, but it is so drop-dead easy.

Now here’s the stuff that really interests me. I mean, I like drinking wine, don’t get me wrong, but I love the story behind wines. So fascinating fact: before winemaker Michal Mosny emigrated to Canada from Slovakia in 2011, he was a professional musician.

Natalie MacLean 00:03:55 I keep wanting to call him a professional museum, but he was not a museum. He was a musician, and he believed that music can profoundly influence mood, emotion and now fermentation. Classical music plays throughout his estate — there are 13 speakers in the vineyard and another five in the cellar. How cool is that? His new line of low- and no-alcohol wines was born out of necessity during the severe frosts in 2024 in British Columbia. He didn’t just pivot. He created a whole new experience, including an opera room tasting space. This may be the only vineyard in the world that blends Mozart and Merlot.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:35 Wow wow wow.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:37 This Riesling next up from Vineland Estates in Niagara, Ontario, is electric with mouthwatering acidity and notes of lime zest and peach blossom. Ideal for grilled sausages, chicken sandwiches and fish tacos. This is your go-to poolside wine for when the temperature soars. It has naturally low alcohol. Serve it cool and refreshing by putting it in the fridge for 30 minutes, or in an ice bucket for 20.

Natalie MacLean 00:05:05 An ice bucket with water, by the way. So you want that distribution of coolness around the bottle for maximum effect, and it works faster than the fridge. Fascinating fact: Vineland has been at the cornerstone of Canadian wine for 45 years. Their property is steeped in history dating back to Queen Victoria’s land grants. Their wine shop is in a restored 1877 log barn that’s like this giant wooden cathedral. It’s beautiful, and their award-winning restaurant is built around a carefully preserved original pioneer homestead. This is a winery really worth visiting. It’s beautiful. All of them are. But given that you can have lunch or dinner here, and the history, and of course, the wine.

Next up is Locust Lane Rosé from Hidden Bench. It’s dry, elegant and bursting with red cherry, rhubarb and a hint of wild herbs. It’s perfect for goat cheese, grilled veggies, or a beet and arugula salad. This wine is perfect for your backyard barbecue get-togethers, as it will appeal to a broad range of palates because it isn’t too heavy with oak or alcohol.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:12 And yet it has all these great vibrant flavours. Now, here’s a story that I really enjoyed learning while on a ski hill in Austria in 2003. Harald Thiel performed CPR on his best friend for 17 minutes. He saved his friend’s life and then changed his own life by founding Hidden Bench. Today, he crafts wines from estate-grown, certified organic grapes. His Old World, minimal-interventionist approach means these wines have depth, character and story, much like their winemaker.

And now let’s end with a bold statement. The Red Icon from Painted Rock Winery in British Columbia is a blend of estate-grown Bordeaux varieties, rich with black cherry, mocha and baking spices. Pair it with lamb burgers, juicy steaks or grilled portobello mushrooms. This is a really superb wine to celebrate special moments like weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, etc. Painted Rock has a global reputation for quality. It was founded by John and Trish Skinner in 2004, and they still bottle from grapes grown on their own vineyards. Despite the 2024 Okanagan freeze, their daughter Lauren now works alongside them, continuing their mission of putting Canadian wine on the world stage.

Natalie MacLean 00:07:32 Their 2020 Red Icon wine was named a Decanter magazine Wine of the Year — the only Canadian wine to be included — and that’s impressive. Now, if you live in Canada, you can order any of these wines, no matter where you live, to be shipped directly to your doorstep. So do it. Support these small family farms. If you live in the U.S. or elsewhere, come visit us. You know the Okanagan, Ontario — whether it’s Niagara, Prince Edward County, Southwestern Ontario, Pelee Island, or the Eastern Townships of Quebec, or the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia — these are gorgeous regions to visit. You’ve got food, you’ve got wine, you’ve got beautiful landscape. I mean, what more do you need?

All right. So you can find all of these wines, of course, on my website. I’ll put links to them in the show notes at Natalie MacLean 351. And of course, I’m always reviewing the wines and sharing new ones on Instagram at Natalie MacLean wine. So follow me there.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:39 Back to today’s episode. Two of you are going to win a copy of Sunny’s Sonny’s terrific new book, The Cynics Guide to Wine. I also have two copies of A season for That Lost and Found in the other southern France, and one last copy of decanter magazine’s new book, The Ultimate Travel Guide for Wine Lovers. If you’d like to win a copy, please email me and let me know you’d like to win. It doesn’t matter where you live, I’ll choose five winners randomly from those who contact me at Natalie at Natalie MacLean dot com. In other bookish news, if you’re reading the paperback or e-book or listening to the audiobook of my memoir, Wine Witch on Fire Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, defamation, and Drinking Too Much, a national bestseller and one of Amazon’s best books of the year. I’d love to hear from you at Nathalie at Natalie MacLean. Com. I’d be happy to send you beautifully designed, personally signed bookplates for the copies you buy or give as gifts. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at Natalie MacLean.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:40 Forward slash 351. As I mentioned last week, Sonny was recording this podcast with me from his wine bar in the heart of London, England. So you’re going to hear the sounds of a busy restaurant in the background, as well as police sirens. So think of it as Law and order. The wine edition. Boom boom. Okay, on with the show. In the industry, as you know, you really go after this myth in your book that the industry focuses on geology rocks rather than the organic matter and the microbes, etc. when we talk about terroir, which is sort of that elusive French term combination of soil, climate, wine making decisions that give wine its character. So you’re saying it’s not about the rocks and the geology primarily. It’s about the organic matter, the hummus and these microbes and these cations, which are nutrients, Organic matter, right? It’s that that gives the wine its character.

Sunny Hodge 00:10:43 I’d be a little careful there, because now what we’re talking about is rocks do play a part.

Sunny Hodge 00:10:49 And if you read the first two chapters of the book, you’ll completely understand how all of the different types of rocks make a difference. Limestones, clays. I can talk about it for hours, but also again at risk. Just making this a solid science chat. It’s worth reading the book just to understand what the different rocks do to vines and how they make a difference, because that’s really useful stuff. I mean, let’s not talk about limestone unless we know what it does. All of the nutrients has an impact on your vine in terms of vine health when it needs it or not. But the step between, do you have a healthy vine that has everything that it needs to perform? And wine characteristics has many interactions that could affect that. There are some locations that have a direct effect on wine characteristics Sticks and some caissons that will have no effect on fine characteristics, but they might make for a really healthy plants and help your plants grow and help your plants survive the next year, or whatever it may be.

Sunny Hodge 00:11:48 But that may not affect your wine, because I think in wine and understanding vines realistically, we’re only focused on how does that affect your wine? Less so than is your vine healthy? Because there are two different things technically.

Natalie MacLean 00:12:03 Absolutely. It reminds me of vitamins. Some vitamins are good for your skin, hair, nails, and others just, you know, cardiovascular health or whatever. Okay, so people need to go to that section of the book because I’m even sort of mucking it about, but because we’re just trying to distill this down in a very limited time. But why do you think the wine industry has focused so much on just the geology and the rocks and talking about soil drainage, because, you know, we want the vines to suffer because then they go into survival mode. They put all their nutrients into the grapes. Those get concentrated, therefore concentrated wine. Why have we focused so much on purely the geology and rocks, and not on these other aspects of the organic matter?

Sunny Hodge 00:12:49 So wine has been around for such a long time, and we prized certain wines.

Sunny Hodge 00:12:56 There are some appellations that have been around forever. We’re talking like champagne shard enough to pop those really, really premium wines. They were selling for a good amount. You know, someone made good money off those wines back in the day. But this, they predate germ theory. We were drinking and enjoying expensive wines, premium wines, before we even understood what yeast was for a long, long time. We were making wines and thinking yeast was a chemical. Even the idea of fermentation. The term further means to boil. So we just thought it was a sort of magic component that would boil our grape juice and make and turn it into wine. We sold wine as a premium product, or many wines as a premium product before we even understood what it was and when stuff happens. Pre science. It’s magic right? Like we don’t get it. We can sell it. We can say that it’s really really tasty but it might as well be magic. There comes a time where the science comes about and then you’re like, okay, what we understood before isn’t technically accurate.

Sunny Hodge 00:14:00 And your question was like, why do we rely on geology? Geology is the most visible differentiating factor between vineyards. You have your vineyards, you’re growing your wine, and you think, why is your vineyard different from mine? This is at a time before we understood what microbes were. This is the time before we understood what yeast was. We didn’t have the chemical analysis to understand what effect it worked. And you’re like, okay, you have lots of this soft clay soil and you have lots of this limestone. Let’s draw up a border based on the things that we can see, because we can physically see that. And then we’ll set our wine laws around that and we’ll talk about those things. I think the huge issue is we’re still talking in that way now. Science has come about in wine, but we’re still talking in that same parlance, which does make sense because nothing’s really shaken it up enough to be like, hey, should we be saying that? And I think this, in its Guide to Wine, is the first huge book that’s come about to really change the way that we talk about wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:56 It did. It is. And just to your point, like you’re talking about this already, but the Kimmeridgian soils of Chablis in France are often credited with imparting oceanic or sailing qualities to wines. The soil is rich in both limestone and clay. As you’ve said, that originated during the Jurassic period 150 million years ago. So it’s known for its mineral content and fossilized oysters and other marine life. But you’re skeptical about that as well. Right.

Sunny Hodge 00:15:25 I would say less skeptical. And I would say firmly, there’s no link. I because I think skepticism comes with, you know, I’m not too sure about it, but I’m pretty sure about it, so.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:40 Okay.

Sunny Hodge 00:15:41 Even understanding an exchange, like as we’ve explained it, we know that the rock, let’s call it a fossil for now. We know that that limestone, that fossil has no direct correlation with your vine. It’s just surrounded by nutrients which the vine takes up. So even understanding an exchange simplistically debunks the idea that we’re actually tasting that fossil.

Sunny Hodge 00:16:03 And that fossil, in the case of Chablis, is like mineralized oysters or fossilized oysters. But then when you understand and when you look at what a fossil is, a fossil doesn’t have that oyster in it. A fossil is a dinosaur. An old tree, oyster shells that has had sediment rested upon it. The sediment over time compacts pressurized. And now you essentially have a rock cast over that oyster shell. So now you’ve got the oyster shell covered in the rock cast, the oyster shell or the dinosaur or whatever it may be erodes away and just dissipates in time. And then you’re just left with the rock cask. So if we’re saying that the fossilized oyster shell makes our wines taste like the sea, that fossilized oyster shell is exactly the same or similar material to a fossilized dinosaur shell or a tree of fossilized plants. So even the fossil itself, it’s just the cost of the original thing, right? So it can’t taste like that original thing because the original things not there anymore.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:10 Yeah. Cool.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:12 I’m going to jump now because I want to get through some of these other aspects of your book that are just mind blowing, literally. You devote significant space to the story of the German scientist and Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber, whose work on adding more nitrogen to the soil, more nutrients led to synthetic fertilizers to help at the time alleviate famine and produce more food. But then he and his work were conscripted during World War One, and it was used as chemical weapons to suffocate soldiers. Can you tell us a bit more about this or your perspective on his work, which seems to have had this sort of profoundly positive intent at the beginning, and then an evil impact at the end?

Sunny Hodge 00:17:52 It’s a really bittersweet story, and I think anyone who’s listening to this, who’s into food and drink, YouTube, this guy Fritz Haber, his life story is fascinating. Unless someone has done already, someone needs to make a film out of this guy. So German Jewish scientist. He and his partner Carl Bosch created the process called the Harbor Bosch process, which essentially solved the mystery, the scientific mystery up till then.

Sunny Hodge 00:18:24 Of how to get nitrogen out of the air in a soluble state that you can use for farming. So a lot of the issues back then and we’re talking sort of early World War one, the world had many, many famines that surrounded and sort of a blight of the world. And they couldn’t get the yields of their crops higher because their crops needed more nitrogen. Back then, high nitrogen sources like guano, which is like bird poo, were like worth a quarter of the weight of gold because people wanted them for nitrogen. Our air, as we know, is predominantly nitrogen. And everyone’s thinking, oh my goodness, if we need nitrogen for our soils to increase our yields and solve world famine, and we’re surrounded by it in the air, how do we get this stuff? So the Harbor Bosch process was the process, almost like alchemy that took nitrogen from the air and allowed us to keep it in a form that we could apply to the earth, and then plants could take up in that in that format.

Sunny Hodge 00:19:28 As you mentioned later on, Harper was a huge patriot, and he went on to become head of Germany’s chemical warfare department. So he went to save the world. And then he was known to be the father of chemical warfare. He invented that type of machinery and a lot of his chemicals that he created, and he oversaw this. So he was a part of this as well. It killed millions and millions of soldiers and was a part of Zyklon B, which the Nazis took after he died and developed his chemical pesticides to be this gas that they put in the gas chambers and killed a lot of people.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:05 Oh my gosh.

Sunny Hodge 00:20:06 Yeah. So a really, really harrowing story. I think the story is something that we should all know if we’re into food and drink, because it does tell the story of how we managed to get those synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. And bear in mind we didn’t have any synthetic fertilizers. Pre harbor Bosch process. The world wanted it. There was starvation everywhere and it single handedly solved that issue.

Sunny Hodge 00:20:32 But now there are a lot of problems that come off the back of those chemicals that were created in World War one and World War Two, including the full cycle of getting those pesticides that had been developed into weapons of mass destruction, and then re utilizing them in farming after the war was done. So all of those technologies that were developed in World War One and World War two, those companies they still talk about today, right? They are still producing chemicals, not for weapons of mass destruction, but they’re producing chemicals for agriculture and farming. It’s good to know what you’re using, and also the negative and positive impacts that that has on your soil. I’m not anti chemical because I think everything is a chemical. Right. But I think it’s useful to know what we’re using and how that impacts our farming now.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:20 Absolutely. And you also make the interesting observation that copper is a heavy metal. It’s toxic at high levels. And yet it is organic. It’s not manmade. It’s synthetic. So organic wine producers are permitted to use it.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:35 What’s your feeling on that?

Sunny Hodge 00:21:37 It’s a really tricky one. Copper is a natural substance. It’s naturally antimicrobial and antifungal, which is why we use it in plumbing. It’s why we use it in hospitals as like, you know, touch pads on doors. It naturally is very, very sanitary. It’s brilliant because of fungal pests like downy and powdery mildew, which now affect vines. We spray our vines with copper based concoctions, various different types, to prevent that fungus building up downy or powdery mildew, which will destroy our harvests. We spray copper as a preventative for those fungal issues. But as you mentioned, it’s not just the heavy metal. Not in the musical sense, but when it rains, it’ll hit your soils. And then you’ve got all of your microbes, which we spoke about before, which are actually breaking down stuff and adding nutrients back to the soil. They all die because you’ve just put an antifungal, antibacterial in your canopy to stop them getting those mildew. And then when they fall to the soils, they affect earthworms and all of the things that we know to be really good for the soils.

Sunny Hodge 00:22:48 Naturally, we stop our soils ability to just look after itself, and then our soil becomes reliant on people and synthetic chemicals. It’s a really tricky thing. We haven’t really found a unified way to overcome downy and powdery mildew without the use of copper. It’s a great preventative. It works. There’s no real obvious solution. There are farming methods that do work, but to do it on a global scale without reducing our yields and without creating more risk. It’s a tricky one.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:20 Wow. All right, let’s move on to smell. You make the interesting observation that inner brain in terms of brain distance. So we’re talking millimeters. But still the center for memory emotion and smell is in one part of the brain. And it’s pretty far away from the language processing part of our brain. And that’s often why we struggle to put words to wine. We know it. We smell it. We remember where we were, perhaps when we first tasted that wine. But naming the flavors is so difficult because those two parts of our brain are very far apart.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:55 You’ve also noted that, you know, it’s a common practice to list flavors in wine, which is a challenge if we move away from flavor descriptors. Is there an alternative language or way to communicate about wine in a meaningful way?

Sunny Hodge 00:24:09 I think there are many ways to do it. What’s really tricky with, I guess, helping get the book out there is if there’s something that’s completely new and pitches to reshape how we think can talk about wine but doesn’t offer what that looks like because it’s brand new stuff, we don’t know how that will change our discourse then. Then it’s really hard to pitch. So that was one of the one of the big issues that I had is helping people understand what the other side of that book looks like, how that affects how we talk and speak about wine. I am a huge believer in putting the information out there and people can make their own decisions. My part in wine, I really see as someone who has put the tools out there to help us make our own decisions.

Sunny Hodge 00:24:58 I’m very hesitant to tell people what to say and how they should say stuff, but I also if if something is inaccurate, I think we should all have the the devices and the tools like this book, to say, hey, this is actually not how it works. Maybe we should stop saying this and start saying that. I think if it was up to me and how I speak about wine and how I trained the teams to talk about wine, is to steer clear away from the subjective stuff as possible. Flavors are important if they technically exist within that wine, and you only know if they exist in that wine. If you understand where those aromatic compounds come from, which also explained in the book. But we rarely choose wines on flavor. So let’s imagine you go to your local wine shop, you want a red wine, who goes to the wine shop and says, I want to win? That smells and taste of strawberry, please.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:50 Oh, right. No one does that. That’s true.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:52 No one does that.

Sunny Hodge 00:25:53 Yeah. We put so much importance on the theater of having a glass of wine and just listing off everything that you smell and taste. We rarely do that with other food and drink. So the thing that we’re so used to doing is actually irrelevant to our buying decisions because we never asked for those things. You just sort of experience it. So I think that theater, because it is theater, we feel the need to present it to everyone that is around us at the time. I think we need to relook at that and think what’s important to us. Is it important to do the theater of just listing off all the aromatic compounds that you smell personally? Because a lot of it, not everyone can smell what you’re smelling? Or is it important to talk about what you get from that wine? I would talk more technically about it. I would like to think about how the tannins as the body of the wine. How much do you get from the oak? Has it been through malolactic fermentation? Do you get all this creamy buttery ness from lactic acid and diacetyl? For me, I would like to see more technical specific balances.

Sunny Hodge 00:26:55 If we’re talking about cream, let’s talk diacetyl, because that’s a word that not many of us use in wine conversations. And the more we speak about it, the more your normal average wine consumers would be like, hey, what’s that? Oh, cool. Let’s speak about this. It’s just like umami, right? Like umami was a word that was unknown to us such a long time ago. And now it’s just a normal food and drink culture. So I think what I really want to see on the other side of this book is loads of new, technically concise words that we can apply to wine, and then you can use that however you wish.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:32 Then we’ll be going into our wine store and saying, I’m really looking for some diacetyl tonight.

Sunny Hodge 00:27:36 Love it. Yeah. I mean.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:37 It.

Sunny Hodge 00:27:37 Sounds like you’re going to a.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:38 Drugstore though.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:40 Yeah it does. So that’s the buttery flavor. Aroma. What does that come from? Is that from malolactic fermentation when they change the harsh acids to softer acids?

Natalie MacLean 00:27:51 Yeah.

Sunny Hodge 00:27:52 So it’s a lactic acid bacteria that will eat malic acid, which is responsible for that tart green apple acidity in your wine. It’ll eat that and then it’ll convert it to lactic acid, which gives you that lactose creaminess gives you that viscosity. As you mentioned, it’s a higher pH. So a lower acidity as a whole. So it’ll drop the acidity of your wine. But also diacetyl is created as a byproduct which gives you that creaminess like that really sort of cultured cream. And so it’s that mix of buttery milky ness. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:29 Okay, cool. We’ve done an episode all on flaws and faults in wine, but I didn’t know this. You point out that cork taint, it’s not so much that it’s affecting or changing the wine, but it affects or changes our ability to smell the wine. What happens? Is it just suppressing our olfactory receptors or what does cork taint doing to us?

Sunny Hodge 00:28:51 It does both. Like it has this musty cardboard smell. So like that musty cockiness does exist in cork called taint.

Sunny Hodge 00:29:02 But in addition to that, it physically suppresses a smell receptor. So the neuronal link there and it’ll just temporarily like mute that. A lot of the time when a wine is corked, we don’t smell any fruits or feel any fruit on that at all. But it’s because your smell receptor has just been muted temporarily because that’s what TCA does. It’ll just mute.

Natalie MacLean 00:29:26 That so.

Natalie MacLean 00:29:27 It mutes it. But it also does change some aromas in the wine. So it does both things. Is that right?

Natalie MacLean 00:29:32 Yeah.

Sunny Hodge 00:29:32 You have the musty cookie smell which dominates. And then it’ll suppress some matrix of smells. And they tend to be like the really fruity vibrant smells.

Natalie MacLean 00:29:43 Okay, cool. You mentioned that vines grown in cooler temperatures, say, under 25°C have more black pepper notes than those grown in warm climates where those black pepper notes get eaten. What do you mean by that? Like, maybe you could just explain cooler wines. More black pepper.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:03 Yeah.

Sunny Hodge 00:30:03 So the black pepper compound that we’re talking about is a compound called Cesky terpene rotunda.

Sunny Hodge 00:30:10 We can just call it rotunda for short, but it is from the terpene family. So that rotunda is the chemical compound responsible for black pepper in black pepper, as well as well as wines. So genetically, some varieties will have higher levels of rotunda than other varieties. The chemical compound is metabolized with heat, so when you have like temperatures over 25 degrees C, your vine will just start to I say eat it up, but it will metabolize it and just use it for something else. So it’s like a little energy source. It’s like a little battery pack. So in those hotter climates, it’ll go from your wines. And then in your cooler below 25 degrees, it’ll stay there. What I find really cool about that is there are many wines where people look for that black pepper. So when you’re having like a Cabernet Franc or even like a Gruner Veltliner, and I’ve done many judging panels where we’ve had a lineup of Gruner and someone smelt it and been like, I don’t get any white pepper.

Sunny Hodge 00:31:14 It’s so not on varietal. And I’m thinking, technically it is. It’s just probably from a hotter climate. And the rotunda is metabolized and disappeared. Does that mean it’s a lower quality? I would think not. I think if anything, it helps you lend a sense of place knowing if there’s no white pepper in that. Gruner. It must be from a place that’s over 25 degrees C. But if you don’t have those tools, if you don’t have the wise, which is what the book is all about, then you can’t start to have those conversations or make those decisions.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:48 So white pepper and black pepper, I get the smell difference. But in terms of this molecule inside wine, is it on a scale where I don’t know. The climate is even cooler if you’re going to get white pepper versus black pepper. Or how does that express itself?

Sunny Hodge 00:32:03 It’s the same thing. You know, you have like white pepper, pink pepper, black pepper, the three types of pepper. Maybe there’s more, but those are the main guys.

Sunny Hodge 00:32:11 Black pepper has been oxidized and it’s gone a little bit black. And then white pepper tends to have that black outside just shaved off. The smells are the same. We and wine extrapolate a little bit and think it’s a white wine. So I may psychosomatic associate it with white peppery things rather than a red wine which might be black pepper. It’s exactly the same sesame type in rotunda. We just sort of trick ourselves into perceiving it one way rather than the other, based on the visual aspect of it. This happens a lot in wine, so I did a little really fun exercise, a little tasting exercise with set. It was a masterclass, touching on some topics from the book. First wine was a white wine and I asked the room there students of wine. They know their stuff. I asked the room to help me draw up some descriptors, some flavor descriptors on the board. We’re writing things like citrus and lemon and lime and grapefruit. We’re writing all this stuff on the board. I ran the masterclass.

Sunny Hodge 00:33:14 We changed the subject. The flavors are still on the board. We tried some other wines. Our last wine, I did the same exercise and it was a red wine. The flavor descriptors, I get a dark cherry. We’re getting like graphite. They’re all flavor descriptors that you would associate with red wines. I had inoculated that second wine with color, like a food dye, anthocyanin based. And essentially the wines were the same wine and just the visual bias that we all have completely changed our perception of that wine. And in the same way, I think with Rose London, if you could. A white wine or a red wine. We will call that same aromatic compound two different.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:55 Things.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:56 Right? Okay, so pink pepper must go with rosé then. But you also say that 20 to 25% of people in the population can’t detect rotunda or Pepper notes. They just don’t have the capacity to detect it. So that’s interesting. Plus, you say that olfactory sense differs by 30% from person to person.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:18 So no wonder we all come up with different descriptors when we talk about all of these differences, right?

Natalie MacLean 00:34:23 Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:25 And is bell pepper in that family too or is that completely different from black pepper? The bell pepper family.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:31 Bell.

Sunny Hodge 00:34:31 Peppers something called methoxy Parisiens. So it’s a different family. It’s not a terpene. Parisians for short are all responsible for that sort of vegetal, green peppery ness. And rotunda is something completely different. But then also, when you look at within this mix up, we’re just talking about language because they’re both got pepper in them. But when you look at a bell pepper, a capsicum pepper, it’s a completely different thing to a black peppercorn. Hence why the chemical compounds are different.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:00 Yeah, absolutely. I want to go through a few more bits and bobs here. Why can’t we smell if a wine is sweet? It just. We can’t. That’s the answer. Or is there anything more to it?

Sunny Hodge 00:35:11 To understand this, we’ve got to look at what’s in aroma.

Sunny Hodge 00:35:15 What is the smell? An aroma is a particle that’s light enough to leave whatever the source is, and then travel in air to get to our nose. So any particle that is light enough to travel through air and hit our nose, and for us to pick it up is what we call an aroma. Sugars. glucose. Fructose. They tend to be quite heavy thing. If you remember before when we were talking about terpenes and we said that those terpenes were bound, glycosidic bound. It means they’re attached to a heavy sugar molecule, which is why when they’re freed from that sugar molecule, they can fly away and then we can smell them. But sugar molecules are really heavy chemical compounds. They’re unable to reach our nose. I mean, a great example is if you have a bowl of sugar, it doesn’t smell like anything. And you know that it’s sweet, but it has no smell. So when we do smell sweetness, let’s say inverted commas, when we smell sweetness in wine, we’re smelling things that remind us of things that should be sweet, psychosomatic, like let’s say.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:23 Lychees.

Sunny Hodge 00:36:24 Or passionfruit or exotic fruits. We have this association because our mind is not really used to smelling things like fruit that actually don’t taste like that. And in the case of wine, because of fermentation, all of the association associated sugars for most dry wines would have been eaten away by yeasts. So it’s this disconnect between our minds thinking this smells fruity, which is normally sweet because fruits tend to be sweet. And that disconnect between the wine smelling like that but not tasting sweet.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:56 That makes sense. And by extension, usually a flat sparkling wine will taste very different from when it’s bubbly, often sweeter. Is that just because the bubbles are masking or mitigating the perception of sweetness? Just like flat Coca Cola will taste very sugary sweet versus carbonated?

Sunny Hodge 00:37:13 Yeah, 100%. When I read the research papers on this, I was like, oh my goodness, mind blown. It all makes sense. I sort of had a feeling about it before, but I never saw it on paper. Right. And I’m like, wow, that’s incredible.

Sunny Hodge 00:37:25 So yeah, like the little CO2 bubbles in sparkling wine, when you pop it in your mouth, they’ll dissolve in your saliva. The more you drink, they’ll get backed up, backed up, backed up. And then what they do is they form a physical barrier between certain molecules hitting your tongue and your ability to taste certain things, and sugar sweetness is the first thing that’ll get blocked out. So if you have a bottling wine that has some sweetness, as your saliva builds up with bubbles, you won’t perceive it. And just like you mentioned in Coca Cola flat, Coca Cola is rancid sweet. It is so different from sparkling Coca Cola, but it hasn’t changed in sugar levels. It’s just the bubbles aren’t blocking your perception of sweetness.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:11 Cool. And then you talk about smelling wine with short, fast sniffs versus long slow intakes of air. How does that change which aromas we smell?

Sunny Hodge 00:38:22 So your sniff velocity, which is like the speed of your uptake, will change the type of aroma molecules that are absorbed into your mucosa, which will eventually hit your smell system, so heavy particles generally prefer like slower, deeper sniffs because they’re heavy.

Sunny Hodge 00:38:50 And like if you think of it like a vacuum cleaner, like if you’re going over really, really quickly, you might miss the heavy bits. But if you spend your time to go slowly over it, you’ll pick it up. So in exactly the same way, but sort of in reverse, slower, steady sniffs will pick up weightier particles. And when I’m talking weightier particles, diacetyl, which we spoke about before, that milky sort of cultured butter, that’s quite a heavy particle. Slow, deliberate sniffs will pick up more diacetyl and wine than really, really quick. And then out sniffs.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:24 What will the quick sniffs get?

Sunny Hodge 00:39:26 Tend to be like the more volatile aromas. So the things that hit your nose quicker. So things like esters which are responsible for like really fruity aromas, you’ll get quicker. Anything off the back of like acetic acid. So that volatile acidity and things like that, you’ll get really, really quickly. It’s really cool to get your head around. And then now I guess all you got to do is dissect the aroma compounds and realize which ones are heavy and which ones are lighter.

Sunny Hodge 00:39:52 Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:53 Yeah. No, I’m going to try that tonight at dinner. Like, try some short sniffs and long sniffs and my husband’s going to wonder, like, what are you doing? But anyway,

Sunny Hodge 00:40:02 Do you think you’re having an asthma attack?

Natalie MacLean 00:40:04 Yeah. That’s right. I need a defibrillator over here. And you mentioned that we’re 400 times more sensitive to bitter than sweet. Why is that.

Sunny Hodge 00:40:14 So? From an evolutionary perspective, we have such a heightened sensitivity to bitterness. So in nature, most bitter things were actually, like, not tuned up to enjoy. In addition to that, a lot of bitter things in nature. So imagine when we were cave people and just like eating whatever we found, you know, we were taking huge risks in what we were eating, but in the name of nutrition, so possibly worth it. But a lot of the bitter bitter compounds tended to be toxins or like poisonous. So our Darwinian way of evolution was to make sure that we were hyper, hyper sensitive to it so that the bitterness we actually taste.

Sunny Hodge 00:40:55 So we needed to know. And by the time you’re tasting it, that things in your mouth, it could be too late a second later, you know, you could have died. So our bitter taste receptors need to be super, super sharp and an almost knee jerk reaction to us spitting the thing out. So that’s why our bitter receptors are so much. And so in June.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:19 That’s great. And then finally just on this section, how does ice open up whiskey. What’s happening with the molecules. Because I would like just a straight on not thinking about it approach would be like okay, it’s just going to dilute down the smell of the whiskey, but instead it opens it up. What’s happening there?

Sunny Hodge 00:41:36 Intuitively, I would think if you’re putting ice in whiskey, it’ll cool the thing down. So your molecules would be less volatile, right? The colder stuff is, the less it smells. So intuitively, it doesn’t make any sense. Why? Adding ice to whisky completely opens it up. But when you look at aroma compounds within a medium like a liquid, some of them enjoy being in certain types of liquids and some of them do not.

Sunny Hodge 00:42:03 So all of your aroma compounds across the board will tend to have a preference between fats, water, and alcohols. And what’s really cool is when you know certain aromas sit within them better than others. It explains why cooking the same stuff in different ways completely changes their flavor. So think of if you have a steak and you fry it in fat. It tastes different from when you boil that steak and that will taste really, really different if you if you could sit in various different ways. A lot of it is to do with the cooking process, but that medium that you’re cooking it in will encourage certain aromas to stick within it, because they sit better within those environments and certain ones to dissipate, and then you’ll smell them. So specifically within your whisky, certain aroma compounds sitting in your alcoholic solution really, really nicely. They’re loving it. As soon as you add your ice, your water concentration increases and those molecules are like, oh no, I don’t like it here anymore. So those hydrophilic particles will suddenly dissipate and think, I want to get out of here, and then you can smell them.

Sunny Hodge 00:43:12 Some cool examples of hydrophilic whisky compounds are like glycol, which is responsible for smoky smells and flavors, which also exists in wine. So like in theory, if you add an ice cube to your whisky, if it has glycol in it for various different whisky making processes, you should pick up a bit more of that smoky glycol vanillin as well. So you know, the the aroma compound that’s directly responsible for vanilla flavors and smells. Vanillin is hydrophilic. I like hydrophobic is a term for something that doesn’t like water that will escape really, really quickly. So yeah, that’ll completely change and go back to wine. Imagine how alcohol levels in your wine will directly influence the smell and flavor of your wine, because all of those alcohol loving wines and those water loving aroma compounds will completely change depending on your wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:07 Wow. Mind blown. Oh my gosh. Sunny, this has been a fascinating discussion. I wish I could keep going, but both of us have to have dinner at some point. But your book is amazing.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:18 Truly. Like I got to listen to it again. I put it into Adobe Acrobat and then I listen to it since I couldn’t find the there’s the book. Okay, yes, The Cynics Guide to Wine. There it is. And so I would suggest people go out and buy it. Of course, you can win one of two copies if you email me. But is there anything we haven’t covered, Sonny? Well, of course there’s tons we haven’t covered, but is there anything you want to mention before we wrap up?

Sunny Hodge 00:44:45 I think we covered a lot. I want to thank you for your time. And also your questions are incredible. And if you think about it, this is a book about really questioning what we understand in wine and food and drink as a whole. So I think you are completely on brand, Natalie. The inner cynic lives within you.

Natalie MacLean 00:45:04 You. You’ve deputized me to be an honorable cynic or whatever. An honorary cynic. And where can we find the book? And you?

Sunny Hodge 00:45:13 You can find me predominantly in my bars.

Sunny Hodge 00:45:16 The book is available online. It’s worth googling. I think different countries is socking it in different places. Amazon. The mouth of Amazon definitely stocks it, and I think that might be the quickest and the easiest way to get your hands on it. I know it’ll be in bookshops, but in the States. In Canada, my understanding of literary outlets is not sharp. So Google this idiot’s guide to wine. You’ll definitely be able to find it somewhere.

Natalie MacLean 00:45:41 Yeah, Amazon has country stores in just about everywhere, whether it’s Cannes, the US, UK, etc. we have Chapters Indigo, so it’ll probably get into that system. Barnes and Noble, maybe in the States. And then there’s it’s published by Academy. Do they, which has its own website. We’ll put all these links in the show notes so that you can find it and order it no matter where you’re at. Sonny, thank you so much for the time and the intelligence and stories that you’ve shared with us, and for clearing up a lot of those wine myths.

Natalie MacLean 00:46:10 I’m just I feel like I can be the smart one now at a dinner party going. Did you know you’ve sparked a whole new, I think, way to think about wine. So thank you, thank you.

Sunny Hodge 00:46:21 I really appreciate your time on the show. Yeah, I’m glad you enjoy the read.

Natalie MacLean 00:46:24 Excellent. I just got to go back and do it again. I think he straightened out what I mixed up, but okay, I’ll say goodbye for now. But Sonny, thank you again and cheers.

Sunny Hodge 00:46:35 Ciao. Thank you for having me.

Natalie MacLean 00:46:37 Ciao. Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Sonny. Here are my takeaways. Why can’t we taste sweetness in sparkling wine? As Sonny explains, the little CO2 bubbles, carbon dioxide in sparkling wine dissolve into your saliva. The more you drink, the more they back up. And then they form a physical barrier between certain molecules hitting your tongue and your ability to taste certain things. Sugar or sweetness is the first thing that’ll get blocked out.

Natalie MacLean 00:47:14 If you have a sparkling wine that has some sweetness as your saliva builds up with bubbles, you won’t perceive it. Just like flat Coca Cola is rancid sweet. It’s so different from sparkling Coca Cola, but it hasn’t changed in its sugar level. It’s just that the bubbles aren’t blocking your perception of sweetness. Number two how much of what we taste in wine is influenced by its appearance or expectations? Well, Sonny gives a really great example. We have three main types of pepper. White. Pink. Black. Black pepper has been oxidized and has turned black. White pepper tends to have the black outside shaved off. The smells though, are exactly the same, but in wine we extrapolate a little bit and we think, you know, it’s a white wine. So I’m going to psychosomatic. We associate it with white pepper. And then with a red wine we’d probably go with black pepper. It’s that same Cisco terpene called rotunda. Then we just trick ourselves into perceiving it one way or the other. And that happens a lot in wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:48:19 And of course, Sonny did that experiment that, you know, I think originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, where wine experts were asked to taste a white wine and then a red wine and describe them. Of course, they describe the white wine with lots of white fruit. Orchard, red wine, red berries. It’s the same wine, but red dye had been added to the second glass of white wine. So perception really does matter. What makes copper both a savior and a threat to viticulture? As Sonny says, copper is naturally antimicrobial and antifungal, which is why we use it in plumbing, hospitals, touchpads on doors. It’s naturally very sanitary. Fungal pests love downy and powdery mildew, which affect vines. So if we spray the vines with copper based concoctions to prevent that fungus from building up, and then you don’t get the fungal pests, it really helps preserve the harvest. But when it rains, that copper hits the soil, and then you’ve got all the microbes in the soil that are good for the vines, and they’re adding back nutrients to the soil.

Natalie MacLean 00:49:29 They all die because you’ve just put an antifungal, antibacterial on them. It’s dripped off from the canopy of the leaves and into the soil. So we stopped the soil’s ability to look after itself. And our soil becomes reliant then on more synthetic chemicals to keep the plants growing. Sonny says we haven’t found a unified way to overcome downy and powdery mildew without the use of copper, but it’s a big challenge for the industry. In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Sonny Links to his website. The video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now, no matter where you live. If you missed episode 331, go back and take a listen. I chat about how oak and yeast magically transforms. Wine and whiskey with Adam Rodgers, another alcohol science nerd. He was fascinating. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Adam Rogers 00:50:30 When you’re drinking whiskey. And it’s that beautiful brown color that’s all from the wood.

Adam Rogers 00:50:34 It is completely clear when it goes into a barrel and it’s brown when it comes out. So color is part of what changes. And also all those flavors, different spirits have different rules about how they age. So wine goes into new oak, bourbon goes into new oak, single malt whiskey goes into old oak. It has to have been used for something else. Second fiddle. So they’ll use a bourbon cask or a port cask or sherry cask that’ll get the flavor of whatever else has been in it, because the process of aging, as the temperature goes up and down the pores and the wood open and close so they’ll open, the liquid gets drawn into that inside layer of the wood and then gets pushed back out. So there’s this kind of back and forth process, which is why so many of the experimental attempts to accelerate that process use heat to try to cycle it faster. And it’s part of why people buy tradition more than anything else. We’ll have younger American whiskeys than European whiskeys.

Natalie MacLean 00:51:30 You won’t want to miss next week when we chat with Ben Spencer, the award winning author of The New Wines of Mount Etna, which The New York Times describes as excellent armchair traveling.

Natalie MacLean 00:51:41 He’ll join us from his home on the active volcano of Mount Etna, nestled on the southern island of Sicily. So from wailing police sirens to erupting volcanoes, the action never stops. On the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’ve been to Mount Etna. It’s gorgeous and it’s always smoking like this sort of threateningly gorgeous, beautiful mountain. And the day I talked to Ben, it was actively interfering electronically with our signal. It was erupting. He didn’t have to run, but I don’t know how I would live on an island that could, like, bury me in lava. Not with my anxiety issues, anyway. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell a friend about the podcast this week. Especially someone you know who be interested in learning more about the weird and wonderful science of wine. It’s easy to find the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favorite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at Natalie MacLean comedy podcast.

Natalie MacLean 00:52:52 Email me if you have a tip, question, or if you’d like to win one of five copies of the books I have to give away. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this episode, or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it. Email me Natalie at Natalie MacLean dot com. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called the Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever. At Natalie MacLean. Com forward class. And that is all in the show notes my friend at Natalie MacLean. 351. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week. Perhaps a wine with a pleasant peppery note?

Natalie MacLean 00:53:41 You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at Natalie MacLean dot com forward slash scribe. Meet me here next week.

Natalie MacLean 00:53:59 Cheers.