Discovery

Anyone who has enjoyed wine for more than the past five or six years has likely noticed a steady increase in wine’s alcohol content. Alcohol content in today’s red wines can reach 15.5 percent and higher, up from 12-14 percent not that many years ago. Alcohol in white wines has also increased significantly. New world wines are generally highest in alcohol, though French wines have also been increasing.

Commentators on the subject point to various factors—including the influence of wine critic Robert Parker’s preference for “fruit bombs” and global warming—for the increase. Whoever, or whatever, is to blame (or to be credited, depending on your perspective), the fact of the matter is that alcohol content is higher because the grapes contain more sugar at picking.

Ethanol, the alcohol in wine, is produced by yeast, various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as a byproduct of digestion. The more sugar yeast has to eat, the more alcohol it produces.

Sugars are higher primarily because grape growers are delaying picking the grapes. “One of the biggest changes, I think, is that winemakers let grapes sit in the vineyard for far longer than they used to,” says Washington State University wine researcher Charles Edwards.

“On the positive side,” he says, “you get much better flavors.”

But getting there requires more of the yeast and subjects it to harsher conditions, among them a higher pH and nutrient imbalance. The alcohol level presents no problem to the yeast. Hardy strains can endure up to 18 percent alcohol. Rather, the working conditions on the way to the alcohol present the problem. Wine must provide yeast with a rich—and potentially hostile—ecosystem in which to work, and the yeast can use any advantage it can get.

Edwards started working with Lallemand, the world’s major yeast producer, several years ago to give S. cerevisiae the boost it needs in today’s winemaking conditions.

The result was not a new yeast (Edwards is emphatic that this is NOT a genetically modified yeast). Rather, it benefits from a modified production process. The result is what Lallemand calls YSEO, short for “Yeast Security Optimization.”

Commercial yeast is grown under obsessively clean conditions in order to make sure unwanted organisms don’t contaminate the culture. Fed molasses, the yeast multiply to a desired population, then are separated from the nutrients and dried for packaging and distribution. Various tweaks in the process—well-protected secrets—resulted in YSEO.

Edwards’s role has been primarily in the evaluation of the product, both in the laboratory and, on a grander scale, with a state winery. One of the batches they tested was worth three-quarters of a million dollars. It made him a “little nervous,” says Edwards.

But the results were great: Faster fermentation, leaving less time for things to go wrong. Significantly less production of sulfur compounds, such as hydrogen sulfide, which can result when yeast are stressed. H2S can result in very unattractive odors and flavors. It is much to be avoided.

A major emphasis of Edwards’s general research is “stuck” fermentation, a situation that the YSEO yeasts seem adept at avoiding.

About 10 percent of Lallemand’s wine yeast strains are now being produced with YSEO, says Gordon Specht, North American area manager who worked with Edwards on the project. Every package of YSEO yeast includes a line noting WSU’s part in the work.

Links

For an animated explanation of YSEO:
http://www.lallemandwine.com/spip.php?article156&lang=en

To read a paper on the process by Edwards, Specht, and others:
www.informaworld.com/ampp/siteindex?request=%2Findex%2F791202314.pdf

Nature, the eminent science weekly, recently ran a news feature on “Five crop researchers who could change the world.” One of those researchers is Jerry Glover PhD ’01, who is now an agroecologist with the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

The Land Institute is at the forefront of the sustainable agriculture movement with its efforts to shift significant production of grain and other food crops from annual to perennial. Both the payoffs and the challenges of such an effort are huge.

Glover’s graduate work at WSU involved assessing the impacts of apple production systems on soil, crop, and environmental quality, disease and pest management and financial performance.  His graduate advisor was John Reganold, with whom he recently published an article on perennial crops in Scientific American.

Benefits of perennial cropping are many. Even the most aggressive annual crops, such as wheat, have scant opportunity to put down roots. Annual tillage required to produce such crops makes the soil vulnerable to wind and water erosion. Perennial crops would also require far less fuel for production as well as less fertilizer and pesticides. Less carbon is released into the atmosphere. And finally, perennial crops encourage biodiversity.
Such a shift in production obviously requires a comparable shift in thinking—thinking about time, for one thing.

In the past, says Glover, there were conceptual obstacles to planning such a shift. “If you have a crisis,” he says, “people put money into band-aids a lot of times. But if you start talking, this is a crisis that needs a long-term solution, it’s going to take ten years, twenty years, or longer to develop fully… then we don’t have that time.”

People are coming around, he says.

But then there’s the biological difficulty in convincing an annual plant that it does not want to die once it has formed it seeds. One would think that such an effort might stretch out beyond the lifetime of the researcher or breeder himself.
“I don’t agree,” says Glover. When the Land Institute’s efforts began, there was a caution on the part of founder Wes Jackson and others. At the time, he “didn’t really see a way to get it achieved very quickly,” says Glover. “But the plant breeding programs here really started only in 1998-99, with the arrival of Stan Cox.

“In that amount of time, we see windows of opportunity, where it could come much sooner [than anticipated] for some of these crops.

“Perennial corn probably isn’t going to cover much of the landscape by the time I die. But something like perennial wheat or the domestication of wheat grass, that could be significant in a relatively short amount of time.”

Work on perennial wheat parallels similar efforts in Australia and at WSU, by wheat breeder Stephen Jones. Jones has been working on a perennial wheat for several years, seeking a crop could hold down the volatile soil of eastern Washington. Currently, in the drier wheat-growing areas, farmers will leave ground fallow periodically in order to conserve moisture and control weeds.

However, the dry, powdery soil of the Columbia Basin, composed of volcanic ash and glacial silt, blows easily. The fine soil particles are not simply annoying, but a possible health risk, exacerbated by the fact that Spokane’s population is directly downwind from the dryland wheat-growing region.

“I’ve been trying to talk someone into developing perennial wheat since the 1960s,” says Jim Moore, a Kahlotus farmer and former head of the Washington Wheat Commission. Read more in Washington State Magazine 

“Vogel [an earlier WSU wheat breeder] told me they couldn’t get enough yield out of it. I don’t care about that. I want something to hold my soil in place.”

Back in Kansas, Glover and his colleagues are also working toward perennial sunflower, sorghum, and, with a program in China, perennial wheat. The most immediate prospect, says Glover, is a perennial legume, the Illinois bundleflower, which could possibly be used as a soybean substitute for feeding hogs.

Links

http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/SEC/Publications%3E%3EScience

www.landinstitute.org

Will Hamlin spent 22 days this fall visiting 21 libraries looking at the same book over and over. Not just any book, mind you, but Montaigne’s Essais. And he wasn’t reading the actual text over and over. He’d already done that. He was reading the books’ owners’ comments written in the margins.

Hamlin is on leave from Washington State University this year, supported by a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. At WSU, he teaches Shakespeare and 17th century English literature. One of his scholarly interests has been the influence of philosophical skepticism on theater of the time, which resulted in his second book, Tragedy and Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England.

Much of his time has been spent in libraries around the country and world in an attempt to measure the culture of the late 16th and early 17th centuries through the reactions of Montaigne’s readers to his Essais.

I met Hamlin (full disclosure–he is a long-time friend) downtown for a glass of wine shortly before his latest venture, to Paris, where he planned to examine copies at the Biblioteque Nationale. He confessed to a little nervousness. Before being allowed to examine the books, he would be interviewed, in French, regarding the seriousness of his quest.

Although he is particularly interested in the first English translation of Essais, by John Florio in 1603, Hamlin is also examining the notations in French versions.

Montaigne is widely regarded as originator of the modern essay, emphasis on “modern.” For Montaigne, says Hamlin, had clearly read older “essayists” such as Plutarch and Seneca.

Though he may owe the Roman writers for the general idea, Montaigne is still modern in his approach. His essays are very personal and range widely in subject: “Of sadness or sorrowe,” “Of Idlenesse,” “Of friendship,” “Of Sleeping,” “Of Smels and Odors.”

Montaigne, one might argue, was the most popular blogger of his time.

Dinosaur that I am, it’s only recently that I started thinking of Web logs, or blogs, as more than merely a quickly dashed off thought, the quickness of it a handy excuse for its sloppiness or ill-logic. In an interesting essay in a recent Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan offers an intriguing argument in favor of blogging.

Most telling, though, is his comment that in contrast to an opinion or essay in print, a blog is “a conversation rather than a production.”

Indeed, Sullivan also points to Montaigne, noting that he published three editions of his essays, each one progressively longer. “A passionate skeptic,” writes Sullivan, “Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before.”

But even more essential to the conversation is the commentary over time from Montaigne’s readers.

“Essai,” you might know, means, among other thing, a trial, an attempt

Because of the nature of Montaigne’s attempts, the response of readers was huge. Whereas 20 percent of books in general from that period were annotated by their readers, 50 percent of Montaigne’s Essais were annotated. Those annotations tell much of what people were thinking at the time and how Montaigne fit, or did not fit, within that thinking. Hamlin says that the amount of commentary shows clear readers’ favorites of Montaigne’s essays, perennial topics, on marriage and sex, religion, education. But amongst the voluminous commentary, Hamlin’s favorite comment is, from an anonymous reader: “Montaigne hath the Art above all Men to keep his Reader from Sleeping.”

Discovery will not be quite as personal or wide-ranging, perhaps, as either Montaigne or modern bloggers. It will be limited to the process of discovery at Washington State University. Which, I’ll say, is pretty wide-ranging. There will be, however, no personal politics. Regardless, I hope, in true timeless blogging fashion, Discovery stimulates conversation, ventures ideas, and, at least, keeps the Reader from Sleeping.

External Links

http://libarts.wsu.edu/english/Will%20Hamlin.html

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/montaigne.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montaigne

http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/montaigne/