The Surprising Science of Booze and Wine with Adam Rogers

Natalie MacLean
Mar26th

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Introduction

How does language about wine impact the way we experience and enjoy wine? How does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics? Why can yeast be described as a nano-technological machine?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with Adam Rogers, author of the New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze.

You can find the wines we discussed here.

 

Giveaway

One of you is going to win a copy of his terrific new book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern.

 

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After that, scroll down a tiny bit more and click on “Write a Review.” That’s it!

I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me.

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Join me on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Live Video

Join the live-stream video of this conversation on Wednesday at 7 pm eastern on Instagram Live Video, Facebook Live Video or YouTube Live Video.

I’ll be jumping into the comments as we watch it together so that I can answer your questions in real-time.

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Highlights

  • What was Adam’s experience at a fancy restaurant in Chicago where food critic Jeffrey Steingarten was a fellow patron?
  • How did a New York restaurant experience expose Adam to the wild science of winemaking?
  • Why did Adam nearly have an existential moment while writing about the science of grapes?
  • How does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics?
  • Which moments did Adam want to capture in the book?
  • What were the most surprising insights Adam uncovered while writing Proof and what was the most difficult part of writing it?
  • Why does Adam describe yeast as a nano-technological machine?
  • Which facts about yeast did Adam find fascinating?
  • What have archaeologists discovered about the role of alcohol in early human civilization?
  • Which cultural approach to alcohol consumption did Adam find most interesting?
  • How do modern brewers and distillers safeguard their yeast?

 

Key Takeaways

  • How does language about wine impact the way we experience and enjoy wine?
    • Adam recounts the story of the couple sitting next to him ordering a dessert wine. The diner asked, “Is that a Vin du Glacier or a noble rot?” The two different ways to make a sweet wine. You can use botrytis, which is this fungus that grows on the grape, makes sugar express more, or Vin du Glacier or icewine where the grapes are picked frozen when their sweetness is concentrated. Just the fact that the diner was informed enough to know that there were these two methods would have a bearing on what he would be tasting. Here was this person operationalizing that interest to make his meal better. He wanted to have more fun.
  • How does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics?
    • When you talk about, at one extreme, wine snobbery, and the other extreme, wine writing, so much of it is just asking, why does it taste like that? Why did those grapes taste good and those ones don’t? Why does that region taste good? How come that elevation on the north side or on the west side of the Napa River is better than that elevation on the east?”
    • If you’re reporting on science, you have the scientists trying to understand something new or reinterpret understanding and then there are people who that’s going to affect. With winemaking, you have practitioners who are often not themselves, scientists. So they are craftspeople in a stakeholder role too. As much fun as it was to visit a vineyard, there were a lot of questions that even those experts making fantastic stuff to drink, couldn’t answer because it wasn’t material to their daily practice.
  • Why can yeast be described as a nano-technological machine?
    • Adam explains that nanotechnology is the idea that you can build mechanisms at the molecular level, or smaller, to make things or to join molecules together and make new products or substances. Louis Pasteur said I think there is an impossibly small, invisible, living creature that eats sugar and poops alcohol, and so the best chemists in the world at that time looked at that as a hypothesis and said, You’re nuts. Nobody knew how inert chemicals could be alive. Nobody knew what the connection was. Those things are enzymes and understanding what enzymes do in a living body, that’s what gave rise to biochemistry, and ultimately gave rise to biotechnology. That one insight.

 

Start The Conversation: Click Below to Share These Wine Tips

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The theater of wine is every bit as important as the actual juice in the glass. - Adam Rogers Adam Rogers Click to tweet

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We’ve met the very technically sophisticated winemaker or the engineer-brained distiller, but you don’t have to do it that way. There are other ways to do it. - Adam Rogers Adam Rogers Click to tweet

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People didn’t know what yeast was until about 150 years ago, but people have been making booze for 10,000 years. - Adam Rogers Adam Rogers Click to tweet

 

About Adam Rogers

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he writes about technology, culture, and the ways they overlap. Prior to joining BI, Adam was a longtime editor and writer at WIRED, where his article “The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress” was the second-most read thing on the entire internet in 2015.

Adam’s WIRED feature story on a mysterious fungus that grows on whisky warehouses won a AAAS/Kavli science journalism award — and led to his 2014 New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. Adam is also the author of the 2021 book Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. He has also written for Alta, the Atlantic, National Geographic, the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian, and may be the only journalist to attend both San Diego Comic-Con and the White House Correspondents Dinner.

 

Resources

 

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  • The new audio edition of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass is now available on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and other country-specific Amazon sites; iTunes.ca, iTunes.com and other country-specific iTunes sites; Audible.ca and Audible.com.

 

Transcript

Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 How does language about wine impact the way we experience and taste wine? How does reporting on alcohol science compared to reporting on scientific topics? And why can yeast be described as a nanotechnology machine? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Adam Rogers, author of the New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover how Adam’s evening at a fancy restaurant where Vogue magazine food critic Jeffrey Steingarten was getting some extra special wine service. How another dining experience exposed Adam to the wild science of winemaking. Why Adam nearly had an existential moment while writing about the science of grapes. The most surprising insights Adam uncovered while writing Proof and the most difficult part of writing the book. The role alcoholic drinks have played in our culture and history. Most fascinating facts about yeast, now there are some dinner party conversation starters. How modern brewers and distillers safeguard their precious yeast strains. What archaeologists have discovered about the role of alcohol in early human civilization. And the cultural approach to alcohol consumption that Adam finds most interesting.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:37 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 00:02:20  Welcome to episode 330. I am always looking for your suggestions for upcoming TV segments about drinks for spring, Easter, Earth Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, barbecue, and of course, O Canada Day. So if you have wines, spirits, beer, cocktail or mixed drinks to suggest that I feature whether they’re alcoholic or not, please let me know. Meanwhile, I’m also reviewing my favourite wines on Instagram at Natalie MacLean Wine. Connect with me there. Back to today’s guest. So I did drop chemistry and physics in my final year of high school because I was doubling down on English and history, but I remain fascinated by science. One of you will win a copy of Adam’s terrific second book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. I also still have two copies of On Tuscany: From Brunello to Bolgheri,  Tales from  the Heart of Italy, edited by Susan Keevil, as well as Fiona Morrison’s Ten Great Wine Families: A Tour through Europe, and two of Rosemary George’s book The Wines of Languedoc. These are gorgeous books with full colour photos and maps. Don’t think you can’t win just because you’re not first on the button to reply to me. All you have to do is email me and let me know that you’d like to win. I’ll choose seven. Count em seven winners randomly from those who contact me at [email protected]. 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 [email protected]. I’d be happy to send you beautifully designed, personally signed book plates that you can affix to the copies that you buy or give as gifts. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at nataliemaclean.com/330. The paperback usually arrives within a day or two of ordering. The book and audiobook are instantly available. Okay, on with the show.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:45  Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he writes about technology, culture and the ways they overlap. Prior to joining by Adam, was a longtime editor and writer at WIRED magazine. His feature story for the magazine on the mysterious fungus that grows on whiskey warehouses, won a AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Award, and that led to his 2014 book and New York Times bestseller, Proof: The Science of Booze. The book also won a coveted IACP Award for the Best Wine, Beer or Spirits book and a Gourmand Award for the Best Spirits book in the United States. Adam’s 2015 article, The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress, I remember that debate, was the second most read thing on the entire internet that year. Holy smokes! And it led to his second book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, published in 2021. Before, BI and WIRED Adam was a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT and a writer covering science and technology for Newsweek. He’s also written for Alta, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New York Times, Slate, and the Smithsonian. And he notes he may be the only journalist who have ever attended both the San Diego Comic-Con and the White House Correspondents Dinner. What a wealth of experience you bring to this, Adam. You join us now from your home in Oakland, California. Thank you so much for being here.

Adam Rogers 00:06:16 My pleasure. Thanks for having me. That  makes me sound like every bit as big a nerd as I actually am. I cannot deny.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:22 It. Oh, I love nerds. Well, I’m a double geek. I love tech and wine, a former tech geek. But anyway, I can’t wait to dive into this with you. So before we dive into your writing career in the book, tell us about the time you were at a fancy restaurant in Chicago and you are watching the much esteemed Jeffrey Steingarten, he was at another table getting a particular type of wine service.

Adam Rogers 00:06:43 This was really formative for me, thinking about wine, I think. I grew up in California. My dad had become kind of a wine snob in the 80s. You know, I knew the drill, but I was an adult with a friend at a really, at the time, one of the best restaurants in Chicago. And we were very excited because Steingarten and… This was when he was on Iron Chef, I think. Even so, he was it was a big deal. He was at an adjacent table and he was getting the full treatment. Like the way a famous food critic will get treated when they go to a famous restaurant. We just watched him over the course of the evening, because we got a long service to three hours there of just getting a wine pairing with each course and watching the glasses get bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of the night.

Adam Rogers 00:07:21 Like it started out, they were the kind of glasses that you would have in your size, that you would have in your house. And then just as the meal reached a crescendo, he had – I’m not kidding –  a wine glass about the size of my head in front of him. And there were two of them on the table. They were just enormous. Like these giant fish bowls. And the pour was the normal. It was a normal sized pour. But he was getting a little bit more probably in four and a half because it was for Steingarten but it was almost a Monty Python level of hilarity. The glasses just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And the chef would come out, was talking to him because I recognized the chef, too. And they were very serious. This was a big deal. They weren’t kidding around. And my friend and I just were just laughing and trying not to embarrass ourselves or look like we were embarrassing them. Because really, it was just the theatre of wine is to me. We’ll talk about this I’m sure, but every bit as important as the actual the juice in the glass. And he was getting the full theatrical treatment.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:11 Absolutely. And so as the glasses got bigger, did Jeffrey get smaller by size or was he starting to slump down in his chair, too [laughter]. How do you stay sober after all that?

Adam Rogers 00:08:20 I never know how anybody does that on a full tasting menu. I have to tell you, I was very impressed. I don’t know what his state of mind was by the end of the evening.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:26 Probably jubilant or blurry.

Adam Rogers 00:08:28 Yes, both,

Natalie MacLean 00:08:29 And we’re going to get to that.

Adam Rogers 00:08:31 Ecstatically blurry. That’s right.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:33 Yes. You are also in another restaurant, this time in New York. Quite the eavesdropper. How did you discover the wild science that is in wine making through that dinner?

Adam Rogers 00:08:43 Reporters are horrible eavesdroppers. You should never trust us. We’re awful. I can also read upside down, so if you have something on your desk I know what it says. This was when I was very young. Young ish. I just moved to New York. We’d only been there a couple of years, and I was happy to have enough money to be able to go out and afford kind of cute, lovely little one and two star restaurants. This was a place called The Tasting Room.  It was run by a very then young couple. The chef was working in the basement just on all electrical stuff. He didn’t have the ventilation to use gas, so it was like basically it had an Easy-Bake stove and an electric hotplate down there, and it was making spectacular continental food basically. And his wife was running the front of the house and was also a trained sommelier. And the wine cellar was in the loft in this tiny little space upstairs. She would have to climb up this ladder to get these really interesting, just real strange wines that she would find.

Adam Rogers 00:09:32 And as our dessert course came – we were all really packed into; it was a very small place – the couple sitting next to us was ordering a dessert wine and she was running down with the options were and was talking about a sweeter wine. And and the guy said, oh, is that a Vin du Glacé or a Noble rot? The two different ways to make a sweet wine. You can use botrytis, which is this fungus that grows on the grape and makes there be more, makes sugar express more as you get a sweeter thing or Vin du Glacée. Chill it so that you get a colder product at the end. You know all that. But just the fact that he was informed enough to know that there were these two methods and that would have a bearing on what he would be tasting, and I don’t know that he thought one tasted better than the other but he just wanted to know. And I had always been that kind of person in bars, certainly with wine, where you sort of look at these different coloured liquids and all the different shaped glasses and wonder, what the hell are all those things? What are they? How do they do that? And here was this person who was operationalizing that sort of interest to make his meal better. He wanted to have more fun at it. And I was like, oh yeah, man, that’s you got to know about that kind of stuff. That’s got to be an adult. That’s how to be a smart adult.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:37 Almost like he was exchanging passwords. Yes, I’m part of this club, so give me the good stuff.

Adam Rogers 00:10:43 For sure. That’s a really good way to think about it too, because it is using language, to do in grouping and out grouping. And that’s so important with wine, booze in general. But wine especially, where if you can have those linguistic cues not only really do enhance your enjoyment of what you’re drinking, but they also cue the people around you to where your stature and stance and positioning is in the community.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:01 You’ve probably heard of this, but one of the nifty snobby tricks I’ve ever heard of, because you should always use your wine knowledge for evil, is that before they even pour the wine in your empty glass, you pick it up and you sniff it and then put it down.

Adam Rogers 00:11:14 Just to make sure you don’t get the chlorine smell from the sink.

Adam Rogers 00:11:17 Exactly, exactly, exactly. And then, of course, only an amateur needs to taste the wine. You just smell it. So anyway, that’s a different podcast. So you had a nearly existential moment while writing the book when you were going to dive into the science of grapes. Tell us about that.

Adam Rogers 00:11:35 This tells on me as a reporter more than anything else. The book divides itself along kind of process lines, of stages of the process of making alcoholic drinks and wine distillates. And I wanted to write about sugar, because sugars are basically the substrates for any kind of alcoholic beverage, because it’s what yeast eats to excrete alcohol. And I was writing this paragraph like literally sort of typing along saying what you would really like if you’re trying to make any kind of alcoholic beverage is something that produces a lot of sugar. So a fruit would be great because it grows. You don’t have to engineer that or something. It would be great if it grew in a lot of places, a lot of different forms. If you could mess with it as a breeder to come up with different kinds of flavours and different colours, that you already knew would ferment on its own, that you didn’t have to do a lot of work to ferment, that could grow alongside other crops if you were growing other crops, that had a lot of juice so that you get a liquid out of it. What you really would love? What you would love is a grape. That was the end of that sentence. And then the next sentence started with so grapes, because it was going to be like here’s what the science, here’s what the biology of grapes are. Here’s what grapes come from. Here’s how they evolved. Here’s the biochemistry of what’s in them. I typed so grapes and realized I had no idea about any of that stuff, but I just had no idea. I knew all the wine stuff. I was like oh crap.

Adam Rogers 00:12:57 I typed so grapes and I had this all in moments. Those two words cost me two weeks. I’m like, I’m going to have to go report grapes. I got to go learn about grapes. Turned out there’s a whole science of grapes. I had to go learn all that. I had to go learn the biochemistry and the botany of grapes. Wow. But, I didn’t know it until the exact moment I knew I was going to need to know it. Which makes me a dope, I guess. I went to learn about grapes.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:19 Makes you a curious, intellectually curious person. Which is thank goodness because you can lead us all into the questions we should have asked. So if your mother wrote a book about you, what would the title be?

Adam Rogers 00:13:30 You want to know something funny? My mom, when I was a baby, when I was about six months old, my mom was in a documentary film about motherhood and feminism in the 1970s. It was 1979, I guess. Yeah, 70’s when they were filming it. So in a way, there already has been that. Well, because she did talk a lot about me and honestly, in her like ambivalence as a young mom who wanted to have like her own life and career and now had a baby at home too. It was called Sylvia, Fran and Joy. It’s not that available, but I think maybe my mom’s book about me would rightly be, I think a book about her. It should be because she had her own. She had her own thing and still does.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:09 Fair enough. I just want to know, because you’re so multi-talented. If your high school yearbook had superlatives, what would you have been voted most likely to become.

Adam Rogers 00:14:18 A massive nerd.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:21 Mission accomplished.

Adam Rogers 00:14:23 Oh, no, I pulled it off. Not only did I win that award, but they were dead right? Y

Natalie MacLean 00:14:28 Well, it’s good to know who you are and where you’re headed. So you’ve written extensively about technology and science for WIRED and elsewhere. How did reporting on alcohol science compare say to other scientific topics?

Adam Rogers 00:14:42 That’s a fascinating question because I that is how I tend to see the world broadly through a lens, through a filter of like, okay, well how can I understand how this works? And journalism and science both have a lot of overlap in their methods and in the kind of hypothesis generating the thinking about stuff, doing research, investigating these hypotheses, and testing them to see which one works. So I tend to think about that with everything. So when I got interested in this. It is such a jumped up way to say this. When I got interested in drinking as a more serious hobby and pursuit. When I was in graduate school and I didn’t have any money at all, but I had a little bit of when my dad came to visit in Boston. I was at BU. And there was a bar that was unusual at the time had an incredible selection of single malt whiskeys, and I’d never had them before. I made my dad and his credit card come to the bar, and we sat at the bar and we both for the first time tried single malt whisky. Asked the bartender which one should we get, and he recommended a couple. We both tasted at the same time, and we’re like, oh crap, this is going to cost us a lot of money in this hobby over the rest of our lives. And in fact, it has. It did. We were right. But that was the way I was always going to understand it. It’s like well why does it taste like that? When you talk about sort of at one extreme wine snobbery and the other extreme  wine writing, like really good sort of writing and thinking about wine, so much of it is just asking, why does it taste like that? If you’re asking, why does the business like that? Why did that family come up as a winemaker? Why do those grapes taste good and those ones don’t? Why does that region taste good? How come that elevation on the north side or on the west side of the Napa River is better than that elevation on the east? Those sorts of questions are all, why does it taste like that? So the tools of reporting about science were always, for me, the tools of thinking about and their reporting about wine and other booze.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:25 Does it differ at all, other than the experiential aspect I’m sure, but are there any differences that you see? The tools, are the same?

Adam Rogers 00:16:32 There is an elemental difference, which is the practitioners. If you’re reporting on science, there’s a gross oversimplification. Forgive me, but you sort of have. There’s the scientists doing the research, trying to understand something new or reinterpret understanding and old understanding. And then there are people who that’s going to affect. Who’s going to use that science, the engineers, the technologists. If you’re talking about biomedicine, the potential patients, the people who want the cures, Those are sort of the stakeholder groups. With wine making, with whiskey making, distilling, whichever of those fields you have practitioners who are often not themselves scientists. They are craftspeople in a stakeholder role, too. I came to find as I was reporting that as much fun as it was to visit a vineyard or visit a distillery, there were a lot of questions that even those people, these experts, these people making fantastic stuff to drink, couldn’t answer. Weren’t answered because they weren’t really material to their daily practice. Some of them were very sophisticated about the science and technology. Many of them were – this isn’t a knock –  but it’s just to say that you don’t actually have to know what the molecular structure of various sugars are to know which one is going to work to make your wine work. But that’s a thing that somebody studying wine at UC Davis might want to know.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:42 And so much of it is bound up with tradition or generational farming. So just follow the recipes that work. Although again, I don’t mean to simplify it, oversimplify it.

Adam Rogers 00:17:51 I came up academically in a at a moment when postmodernism and post-structuralism were big deals in the academy. And so the idea that there are different ways of knowing something is sort of built into my training. These are different ways of knowing or understanding the same thing, the same process. And there are people who do both. You’ve met him, and I’ve met him, a very technically sophisticated winemaker or an engineer brained distiller or a chemistry brain distiller or somebody like you. Meet them, but you don’t have to do it that way. There are other ways to do it.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:18 Yeah, more fun, too.

Adam Rogers 00:18:20 Sometimes that’s true.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:22 So when you mention that certain moments at bars led to this book, you’ve already shared one with your father. Were there other perfect bar moments that sort of crystallize your desire to explore the science behind booze?

Adam Rogers 00:18:34 I did come to want to understand the experience. Also, because it’s fun. It should be fun. I made this comment. It’s in the book and I’ve said it to people before, too. I wanted to be mindful that alcohol is not a safe thing for everybody, that there are people who have dependencies on it, and that it can be very damaging to people’s lives. It can be damaging to someone’s life. Even if you don’t, you can have too much of that and get into a car and it can be very dangerous. So I want to take it seriously in that sense. And I would say that the book overall, all the book sort of takes place at the moment of the first sip of your second drink. So you’ve had one. You’re not impaired, but you are feeling differently because of the alcohol, and you have a second one, and it tastes the way at that moment, that first sip of that second one tastes. That’s the spatiotemporal pivot point around which the book happens if there is one of those. And so that was sort of made me think about what are those moments. What is that moment like? What does that feel like?

Adam Rogers 00:19:28 And I mentioned one in the book, too, of being late to meet a friend at a bar on a really hot day and showing up in this bar, and it was like when I was in Washington not really doing that great a job as a Washington correspondent. I was very stressed out all the time. So meeting his friend at this bar, it was sticky and humid, like it can be in Washington. I was running across town, but I got there and the bar was cool because it was air conditioned. It was dark because a lot of good bars are dark. And the moment of getting a beer put down in front of me and being able to pick it up, feeling the condensation on the outside of that glass, and bringing it up to my lips to have the first sip of it, it was like bullet time in the Matrix. It was like the camera revolved around this frozen moment of perfect. And I’m not even I’m not a huge beer fan. It didn’t matter what it was. It mattered that it was in this space that we culturally define as a spatially contained place where like kinds of alcohol are consumed.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:23 Yeah. And you say it’s always 10 p.m. in the bar. I love that.

Adam Rogers 00:20:28 It’s always 10 p.m. in a bar, especially an airport bar, where time is always best. It’s always 10 p.m. in an airport.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:33 Yeah. Vodka, the breakfast of champions. That’s a beautiful description, though, of that letting go, that breathing in and letting go. And it’s like that first or second drink, especially. Whoo! What was the most surprising insight you discovered while writing the book? We’re going to dive into the different sections, but overall, is there something that just, wow, that stays with you?

Adam Rogers 00:20:54 I remain stunned, and this was kind of a thing that I came to working on that feature, that article about the whiskey fungus. Even that led in most respects to the book for how long in human culture, making different kinds of alcoholic drinks was so fundamental to who we were as people, without us knowing anything about how they were made. People didn’t know what yeast was until about 150 years ago, but people have been making booze for 10,000 years. I talk about this a little bit, maybe too much, but there are these religions that are now called mystery cults on the Mediterranean islands like Minos and Crete. And I read a book about these cults that said that they were so old that by the time of the archaeological records that we have of them, those people did not know who their own gods were because the mystery cults were so old before that, that they lasted for thousands of years.

Adam Rogers 00:21:55 And by the time the practices that existed that we have archaeological records of were happening, they were doing these practices without knowing. They didn’t know their own gods anymore because they were so old. And I feel a little bit that way about alcohol, that they existed for so long that people didn’t even know their own gods. They didn’t know what this stuff was, but they knew they loved it, and they knew it was important and they knew how to make it kind of. And it was still critical. It’s still vital to who we were.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:16 Yeah, but the why it happens, how it happens and how we react with it, all of that we’re going to dig into. A  lot of mystery still. What was the most difficult part of writing the book?

Adam Rogers 00:22:26 Oh, man, writing books is really hard [laughter]

Natalie MacLean 00:22:29 It is. It is. I know, even if you’re drinking [laughter].

Adam Rogers 00:22:32 I mean, I did find, ironically for this, I couldn’t, you know. For the reporting I could, but while I was writing, no alcohol at all. I’d have one sip of something, you’d be like, well, I’m done for the day. That’s it. I’m out. The hard part with writing a book, really, as a writer who I know said a long time ago, ass in chair. You just have to be there typing. You have to do that. It’s a grind. I like writing, I mean, I do it professionally. It’s my thing. But really, it was the love of material itself that will keep you doing this book. Just to be super cynical about it, a book got to be about 90,000 words. Takes at a peak efficiency, if you’re really good, you can write a thousand words a day that you can use. So that’s a long time. That’s four months of writing. If you’re not, if you’re writing five days a week, that’s like a lot of time sitting in front of the same thing, just trying to make it work and trying to write something that people will like. So when it happens, when somebody like you says, hey, that was a really good book, You’re like, oh thank God. That was worth it. I’m so glad because that’s all I wanted. All I wanted was I wanted people to like it and I wanted to every so often I wanted to go into a bar that I’d never been to and see it on a shelf. And that has happened. That’s happened to me. And I’m like, good. That’s all I ever wanted for it. It worked.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:40 The top award on top of everything else, the awards you’ve won, there is nothing like seeing your book in a bar, is there? That’s great.

Adam Rogers 00:23:47 That’s the one man. That’s the thing. I don’t know what it is, but yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:51 Cool. All right, so let’s finally get into this book. You organize it according to the process of making alcohol. You start with yeast, move through sugar, fermentation, distillation, aging, smell and taste, and then finally the impact it has on our body and brain. So yeast will start there. It’s important. As is noted in 1996, it became the first living organism to have its DNA sequenced. And yet yeast is the unsung hero of alcohol production. We tend to overlook it. You describe it as a nano technological Machine. What do you mean by that?

Adam Rogers 00:24:26 Nanotechnology is the idea that you can build mechanisms at the molecular level or smaller to make things, or to join molecules together and make whole products, whole substances. And it’s mostly still science fiction. But if we didn’t know what wine was and if you didn’t know what yeast was, which like I said they didn’t 150 years ago, if I told you that there was something that did this, you would think I was nuts. And in fact, when Louis Pasteur and others said, this is what yeast did, they thought he was nuts. Because what he said is, I think there is an impossibly small, invisible living creature that eats sugar and poops alcohol. Yeah, right. And so the best chemists in the world at that time looked at that as a hypothesis and said, you’re nuts. That can’t work.

Adam Rogers 00:25:15 And mostly the reason they didn’t think it could work was they didn’t know. Nobody knew how inert chemicals could be alive. Nobody knew what the connection was. So, Pasteur, in figuring out that there were microorganisms living in a beet sugar fermentation tank, which is what he was studying, and that those were not only making alcohol, but also causing this stuff to be rotten. If you had the wrong kinds of little invisible guys, you had the wrong kind of stuff at the other end, That insight was what created biochemistry, living chemistry. The researchers trying to figure out. Okay, I’ve got these living things. They make stuff. And that stuff converts sugar to alcohol. What is that stuff? Those things are enzymes and understanding what enzymes do in a living body. That’s what gave rise to biochemistry and ultimately gave rise to biotechnology. That one insight. What I mean is this nanotechnology miracle that nature creates just these little guys who do this thing that is so inimical to who we are as a culture, as a species.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:21 Absolutely. And is there sort of a mindblowing fact you learn about yeast during your research? I mean, that’s pretty mind blowing. There’s what it does. But what else about yeast fascinates you?

Adam Rogers 00:26:34 Well, I think for a long time people didn’t know why they did it, because they do it without people being around. It’s not like a bar where we go up and say like, hey, yeast, I’d like a beer. They do it anyway in nature, and they have since before there was fruit on earth. Yeast existed before that. So clearly yeast turning grape juice into wine is not their existential or evolutionary purpose. So you ask, well, what were they trying to do? Why do they make ethanol? Ethanol is a good way to store energy. It’s a pretty complicated molecule. You can use it kind of like mammals use ATP as an energy source. Or there’s a reason that ethanol works as a gasoline replacement because it’s a good source of energy as a molecule.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:13 So they were making food for themselves.

Adam Rogers 00:27:14 That was one of the hypotheses. But the other hypothesis is that ethanol is also really good at killing microbes. You put alcohol on a cut so that you don’t get infected. That’s why we do that. So maybe it was a defense mechanism trying to figure out well.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:27 The competition, yeah.

Adam Rogers 00:27:28 Exactly. You know, it was only in the last 20 years that the experimental methods existed to try to figure out, okay, which direction did this go? Were they making alcohol to keep it or were they making it to diffuse it? And it was really that evolutionary history. That was the first clue, which is that it kind of had to be that they were making it to diffuse it and use it as a defense, because living inside a fruit and having a build up around them where it would be toxic, the fruit didn’t exist yet. They were living on the outsides of things before they were living on the insides of things. So that the notion is that they were making it for energy first. They were going to use it as a store, as an efficient store of energy. And then and now we get the benefit of that for millions of years later.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:04 Okay, okay. And I love this. You refer to this a few times. We domesticated yeast for our purposes to make alcohol, but you still medicated us. I guess we settle down. That’s the beer bread argument. Did we become less nomadic to farm to make beer or alcohol? But how did you. Did researching this change your perspective on our relationship with alcohol?  Did we domesticate yeast or did it domesticate us?

Adam Rogers 00:28:32 I think these questions of domestication got much more interesting to me more broadly, as we think about what the human relationship to the the rest of the natural world is and what our responsibilities to it are, whether we’re allowed to do whatever we want with it, what kind of a steward we’re supposed to be if we are supposed to be stewards. You know, what does it mean to farm? What does it mean to raise animals if you’re going to eat them? What does it mean to change an environment where there were no human beings lived at someplace where there are a lot of houses or a lot of buildings or a lot of cars, you know, what are our responsibilities to take care of the planet that we live on? Thinking about it through the lens of domestication was really important to me of like, okay, we’ve changed things for sure.

Adam Rogers 00:29:08 That’s what we do. Human beings change stuff. That’s one of the signal things about humanity. So when we do that, what are our responsibilities there? It’s not just can what can we extract out of it? Can we just pull the alcohol out? No. We’ve got to make sure that everything else is okay to to do this in an ethical and a responsible way and still get the things that human beings like and need and want.

Adam Rogers 00:29:28 Okay.

Natalie MacLean 00:29:29 I was also intrigued by your account of the archaeologist, Patrick McGovern, identifying what might be the oldest evidence of human controlled alcoholic fermentation in China. What does this discovery tell us about the role of alcohol in early human civilization? Did they just like the intoxicating effects?

Adam Rogers 00:29:47 I think McGovern would hypothesize that it was important for ritual, and I think that it still is. You know, these are these are rituals. Fundamentally, they’re going out with friends for drinks is a pretty core ritual for human culture. But there just were not a lot of psychoactive chemicals.

Adam Rogers 00:30:07 You know, there was no drug business. So the idea that there were plants derived or other derived substances that would change the way you felt when you consumed them. This was arguably the basis for transatlantic trade in the colonial era between Europe and the Americas, that they were finding stuff. You’d be like, wow, if I put that in my mouth, I feel different. Before that, the only stuff that they had were monks telling them lies about what kind of lizards to grind up that would cure your ills or whatever. And this, I think is something like that too, that like for McGovern, he’s got this thing like, look, they were doing it even that in 10,000 years ago. They were doing it and and they didn’t know how it worked necessarily. And they were combining a bunch of different ingredients that we wouldn’t use as much anymore. But it was still this thing that if you and I sat down with those people 10,000 years ago, we would taste it and recognize what they were doing, that it was core, you know, to the religion, the society, the way things functioned.

Adam Rogers 00:30:56 You had to have alcohol at the if not at the center, at least on the table.

Adam Rogers 00:30:59 Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:00 I’m going to think about that when I meet friends for drinks. This is a ritual we are practicing together. I just, you know, you don’t think about that either, much less the alcohol you’re consuming. But it’s all of a piece going back deep into time. So the book touches on how different cultures have had different drinking patterns and behaviors. Which cultural approach to alcohol consumption did you find most interesting?

Adam Rogers 00:31:23 You know.

Adam Rogers 00:31:24 I liked the ones where it wasn’t culturally toxic. There were there were a few where. Yeah, I mean, there were a few where the expectation was that it was going to be all men and they were going to get violent. And you still see some of that in some cultures. I mean, I’m not going to name any, any names, but everybody can I can think like, oh yeah, I guess that is how alcohol gets consumed there. The ones where it was somewhat ritually, quietly consumed among friends to become more contemplative were the ones that I identified with.

Adam Rogers 00:31:53 But I have a feeling that this is, as a friend of mine said to me once while we were sitting in a bar having drinks, or you said, you know, Adam, there are club people and there are bar people, and you and I are bar people. And I think this is what I this is that coming out again is like, it’s not so much a dance club thing for me. It is a sit and work out the ills of the world thing for me.

Adam Rogers 00:32:10 Right?

Natalie MacLean 00:32:10 Right. I like that. I like how you frame all these questions by visiting different people and places. It really brings the story alive. But you visit the National Collection of Yeast Cultures in the UK, where they saved a rare yeast that the Jennings brewery lost after a devastating flood. Tell us about that. They preserved the original yeast, so they got it back. But how do modern brewers and distillers safeguard their yeast? Is it mostly these national collections? Do they do anything else?

Adam Rogers 00:32:38 This is a divisive question because some alcohol makers don’t think the yeast is that important or not the most important part of their process.

Adam Rogers 00:32:48 So they’ll buy a commodity yeast. Then there are whole companies that grow up their yeast and make sure that the yeast, the specific strain of yeast or multiple yeast stays stable enough so that they can know. They know what to expect, both in terms of their productivity and also in terms of the other flavors, because they make more than just sugar, they make other stuff. And those are some of the flavors that we detect, but some distillers and some brewers and some winemakers think that the yeast is critical. They want to use a specific one. And that’s especially true with with a lot of kinds of beer, especially with the kinds of beers that they make in England, where if you’re making a lager versus a ale, there’s yeast that either float at the top or sink to the bottom, and which what kind of flavors they make is critical. If you’re making real ale versus that, they would see as the crummy stuff that, like a giant American or transnational brewer would make. And so if you’re one of those people, if you think that your particular yeast is critical to what you make, you have to do everything you can to preserve it.

Adam Rogers 00:33:45 So I’ve been to distilleries, for example, where there’s a whole department that’s all about keeping the yeast and then like making sure that there’s one reference strain, that then they grow up a little bit, but they keep a lot of the reference strain behind because as yeast grow, they mutate and develop and change. And you don’t want it to change. At for Rose’s Distillery, which makes bourbon in the US, the four Roses are the four strains of yeast that they use. You know, they really care about that. Some stories. Some stories don’t. Okay. So like, what Jennings did was the brewery was destroyed in a flood. And their yeast collection, which was the thing that they felt made Jennings taste the way it did, was gone. But they had one sample at this collection at a university miles away. And so they could go get their sample that had been preserved, you know, in suspended animation and liquid nitrogen, and grow it up again and start making beer again. The machinery you can get anywhere, you know, the water is a thing, but if you get the water from the same source, that’s the thing.

Adam Rogers 00:34:38 Some places will decide that their substrate is key, you know, does it matter which grain you use, or do you just need the same species of grain every time? All these places make these decisions and that’s what the product is. And some of them still think the yeast is important to I happen to think the yeast is super important. I’ve been thinking about it a lot actually. Yeah, because.

Adam Rogers 00:34:58 Well, because strain.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:59 On your mind, I mean, I sorry, I’m sure you I know you like puns.

Adam Rogers 00:35:03 It’s true. Yes.

Adam Rogers 00:35:04 No, no, that’s absolutely right. I went to a wine tasting that was mostly pet gnats from Eastern Europe, and they were very yeasty and I thought they were terrible.

Adam Rogers 00:35:15 Yeah.

Adam Rogers 00:35:16 You know, this is all super subjective. I know there are people who love them. I’ve never particularly liked sour beers either. The beers that use the wild type yeasts, that’s never really been my thing either. And so when I was like, wow, this is really a new thing, a new way for wine to taste.

Adam Rogers 00:35:29 Didn’t used to taste like that. That’s interesting. It’s not my thing at all. I’m going to go inside and get a totally different glass because this is not for me. But this is the yeast, you know, coming to the fore. It’s these are very yeast forward flavors. And it’s really interesting to see that to me. I would have thought like, that’s the way wine probably tasted 2000 years ago, when they were still mixing it with honey and spices before Odysseus could drink any of it. But now we’re back to it.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think yeast makes a difference. And I’m always intrigued when I see on the wine label made with wild yeast, or some will have it even as their sub label name or whatever. But I do think it makes a difference. And it can be. I don’t know whether you believe in terroir or not. More terroir ish of the place if it’s wild yeast from the native surroundings. So. Absolutely.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:17 Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Adam. Here are my takeaways. Number one, how does language about wine impact the way we experience and enjoy it? Adam recounts the story of a couple sitting next to him ordering a dessert wine, and the diner asked, is that a Vin du Glacier or a noble rot, monsieur? The two different ways to make sweet wine were embodied in that question. So you can use botrytis, which is a what they call noble rot, a friendly fungus that grows on grapes and makes the sugar concentrated, or Vin du Glacier or ice wine, where the grapes are picked frozen when their sweetness is concentrated. Just the fact that the diner was informed enough to know that these were two different methods would have a bearing on what he would be tasting. Here was a person operationalizing his interest to make his meal better. He wanted to have more fun. I love that.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:11 Number two, how does reporting on alcohol science compare to other scientific topics? Adam explains that when you talk about at one extreme wine snobbery and the other wine writing, so much of it is just asking why does this wine taste like it does? Why do those grapes taste good and those don’t? Why does that region taste good? How come that elevation on the north side or the west side of that river is better than the elevation on the other side? If you’re reporting on science, he says, you have scientists trying to explain something new or reinterpret a current understanding. And then there are the people who that’s going to affect, those who will be the beneficiaries or users of that science. With winemaking, you have practitioners who are often themselves not scientists, so they are craftspeople with a stakeholder role. They’re not unbiased. And as much fun as it was to visit a vineyard, he said, there were a lot of questions that even these experts who are making fantastic things for us to drink couldn’t answer the questions because it really didn’t matter to their daily practice.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:21 And number three, why can yeast be described as a nano technological machine? Adam explains that nanotechnology is the idea that you can build mechanisms at the molecular level or smaller to make things or to join molecules together to make new products or substances. Louis Pasteur said, I think there is an impossibly small, invisible living creature that eats sugar and poops alcohol. And the best chemists in the world at the time looked at him and his hypothesis and said, you’re nuts, buddy. And if they had been on social media, they probably would have canceled him. That’s because nobody knew how inert chemicals could be alive. Nobody knew what the connection was. Those things were enzymes. And understanding enzymes and what they do in a living body is what gave rise to biochemistry and ultimately to biotechnology. That’s one smoking insight.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:24 In the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my conversation with Adam, links to his website and books, 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 217, go back and take a listen. I chat with Nell McShane Wulfhart, author of Off Menu: The Secret Science of Food and Dining. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Nell McShane Wulfhart 00:39:59 What we hear can change the flavour of what we’re eating. There was a great experiment by Charles Spence. He called it think the sonic chip. He gave a bunch of people in a lab some Pringles out of the can, and he put headphones on them. And for some of the people eating the Pringles, he turned up the volume of their own crunching. And those people perceived those chips as being fresher than the ones who just heard it at the regular volume. In general, smell is definitely the most powerful one, especially when it comes to things like wine. And it’s that flavour. It’s a smell, plus the taste, plus the other senses that creates flavour. Flavour is  really created more in your mind than it is on your tongue.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:41 You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chat with Adam. If you liked this episode or learned even one teensy tiny molecular thing from it, please, please email or tell one friend about the podcast this week. Give me hope that the viewers know, not viewers. Listeners are rising. Why am I doing this here? I need your support and especially someone you know who be interested in learning more about the science of wine. It’s easy to find the podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favourite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on the website at nataliemaclean.com/podcast. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, or would like to win one of seven copies of books by Adam, Susan, Fiona or Rosemary, or if you’ve read my book or listening to it, let me know you’re there and I’m not alone. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so email me at [email protected]. In the show notes, you’ll also 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 nataliemaclean.com/class. That’s all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/330. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass, perhaps a wine made with wild yeast that rocked your world. 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 nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.

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