See… this is the problem with writing science-fiction today is that just about anything I can come up with is already being done.

French scientists have devised a way of using particle accelerators to authenticate vintage wines, one of France’s top research bodies said this week.

The new method tests the age of the glass in wine bottles by analysing X-rays emitted when the bottles are placed under ion beams produced by a particle accelerator, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a statement.

“This enables the age of bottles and their origin to be verified and thus a vintage to be authenticated, a bit like the signature of a painter on a masterpiece, all without opening the bottle and without affecting in any way the content,” it said.

I haven’t made a lot of noise about this but one of the things that’s been hard for us over the past year has been the bizarrely difficult time Rob has had finding a job. Some of this is circumstantial; we arrived right before the writers’ strike started and Rob works in film and television.

He’s had some gigs through the year, but nothing that lasted more than a couple of weeks. The perils of freelancing, you know?

Last week, he started working as the assistant winemaker at City Winery. Remember that film and television thing? Yeah, well, he has a completely separate career as a wine maker. We both find it ironic that he left his wine-making job in Oregon to come to New York and will be doing the same job here as there.

We are much relieved. In particular because I’ve had to take every job that came my way. This means I can turn things down occasionally.

It also means that I lose my house-husband and, after a year, I’m a little spoiled.

Here’s a bit of wine-maker jargon for you. Our friend Wayne is in town for a couple of days. He and Rob have been talking wine and wine making like they’ve both been starving. I’ve been listening and mostly staying out of their way. But this, this I had to share.

We were at dinner and they were talking about this new winery that Rob has started working at¹ and he said something about how all the grapes were going to be delivered in FYBs.

I said, “What’s an FYB?”

Wayne looked at the table next to us and then said, “Well. F stands for something that’s not polite to say at a restaurant.”

I stare at him for a second before I get it. “Really?”

“Yes. With an -ing. Then the other two are Yellow Bin.”

Rob confirmed. Apparently the F***ing Yellow Bins are so universally reviled for being hard to work with that this is an industry standard term. Everyone calls them FYBs.

1. Did I forget to mention that? [↩]

My husband, wrote an article about New York city winery in Decanter magazine.

This autumn a new winery will open its doors among the luxury shops, avant-garde theatres and loft residences of New York’s SoHo

City Winery is New York’s first ‘private label winery’ where members can vinify their own barrel of wine, managing its life from fermenter to barrel to bottle.

When one’s husband is a winemaker, one sometimes receives compliments in the following manner.

Rob: It’s maturity. The tannins are falling out.
Me: As long as I don’t become flabby.¹
Rob: No, I think you still have structure.

1. This is an actual wine term [↩]

This very interesting, but too short article talks about the use of sailing ships to reduce carbon emissions.

An excerpt:

French vineyard owners are returning to a slower pace of life by starting to export their wine by sailing boat - a method last used in the 1800s - to reduce their carbon footprint.

Later this month 60,000 bottles from Languedoc will be shipped to Ireland in a 19th-century barque, saving 18,375lb of carbon. Further voyages to Bristol, Manchester and even Canada are planned soon afterwards.

The three-mast barque Belem, which was launched in 1896, the last French merchant sailing vessel to be built, will sail into Dublin following a voyage from Bordeaux that should last about four days. The wines will be delivered to Bordeaux by barge using the Canal du Midi and Canal du Garonne, which run across southern France from Sète in the east, via Béziers in Languedoc. Each bottle will be labelled: ‘Carried by sailing ship, a better deal for the planet.’ Although the whole process will end up taking up to a week longer than a flight, it is estimated it will save 4.9oz of carbon per bottle.

Does anyone else feel a story possibility sitting here?

Today Rob and I hosted about fifteen writers for a wine-tasting. We tasted a variety of wines from top-shelf to rock-bottom. The idea was to learn how a wine snob would approach wine as opposed to a hard-nosed detective. I asked Rob to find some flawed wines as a contrast to the good ones. As a non-wine geek, I have learned that I can tell the difference between bad and good wines, but that mediocre and good are harder to tell apart.

He arranged the afternoon into three flights of wine. Each flight looked at a different common style of wine. Here’s the fact sheet he prepared for the folks who attended today.

Rosés

Sutter Home
White Zinfandel (rosé)
California, 2006
As the bottle proudly proclaims, this is the original “White Zinfandel”. While certainly not the first rosé produced from Zinfandel, it was the first made is the light-bodied sweet style and marketed aggressively. It is produced from Zinfandel grown and vinified in California´s central valley on a prodigious scale. It is a true mass-market wine.

Domaine Sautereau
Sancerre rosé, Côtes de Reigny
Loire Valley, France, 2006
Situated in the village of Crezancy this 18 hectare estate has been producing wine for 9 generations. Sancerre is primarily of producer of Sauvignon Blanc but Pinot Noir is also grown to make red wine and occasionally rosés such as this one.

Chardonnay

Frameworks
Chardonnay, Oracle Vineyard
Willamette Valley, Oregon, 2003
Included today as an example of an overtly flawed wine. It has been “cooked” in transport. Wine is a living substance and poor handling can injure or kill it. This is one gross example of such abuse.

Domaine Dujac (Druid)
Meursault, Le Limozin
Burgundy, France, 2000
Domaine Dujac is a highly respect producer of red burgundy in Morey-St. Denis. This is an unusual example of a white, which is produced from purchased grapes of the Le Limozin vineyard (a village cru but one of premiere cru status). This is Chardonnay but made is a racy and refined style.

Ferrari-Carano
Chardonnay
Alexander Valley, 2005
California Chardonnay - big, buttery, oaky. Love or hate it, this is what built the California wine industry into what it is today.

Cabernet Sauvignon

Barton & Guestier
Vin De Pays, Cabernet Sauvignon
France, 2003
This is a typical inexpensive table wine, a style produced around the world for everyday consumption. A comparable American example would be Charles Shaw (2 buck Chuck) from Trader Joe’s. Grapes, or juice, or even finished wine is purchased, blended and bottled by some entity which then sells the wine under its own brand. Occasionally, one finds a pleasant bottle in this category but they are intrinsically generic.

Mayacamas
Cabernet Sauvignon
Napa Valley, 1998
While this winery is within the Napa Valley appellation, the vineyards and winery are near the top of Mt. Veeder at an elevation of 1,800 to 2,400 feet. Robert Travers, the winemaker, strives to make intense, long-lived wines in the tradition of great red Bordeaux which express the personality of the vineyard - the terroir. Like nearly all Bordeaux, this is a blend with small portions of Cabernet Franc and Merlot added to the Cabernet Sauvignon for balance and complexity.

I suspect we will do another of these. The thought at the moment is to do a vertical flight (same wine, different years) to show how wines evolve. Also we’re thinking of pouring the wine in three different types of wine glasses to show how the vessel can impact the flavor.

What would you want to get out of a wine tasting for writers?

Rob sent me the link to this article called, “Science of Magic” in the New York Times It is fascinating and worth reading, even if you have to register.

A sample from page three:

Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — “ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather” — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”

That is one of the best definitions I’ve ever heard.

Rob has a collection of wine. The trouble with driving across the country in the summer is that the wine would bake in the moving truck. So, today we had guests over to help empty the cellar. The highlight of the evening, for me was his Domain Du Mas Blanc from Banyuls from 1977. (Rob points out that this wine celebrates the 30th anniversary of Star Wars.) It was surprisingly vibrant.

What’s also surprising is that we still have wine left over. Fortunately, folks are coming to help us move out of the house on Tuesday.

The article that I modeled for is out today. David Chelsea does the art for the Modern Love column at the NY Times and asked me to pose for this. It’s not my face; he morphed me with the author of the article.

How My Plumber Turned Water Into Wine - New York Times

I CLIMBED the steps to my apartment that night, buzzed on old Italian wine and the kind of emotional spark I hadn’t felt with a man in way too long. Musing over whether I had the nerve to jump back into the romantic world again, I stepped into the bathroom to discover, courtesy of my bare feet, that my hand-knotted Persian rug was soaked.

I’m in the kitchen cooking. My husband is on the phone with his friend, Wayne. He says, “Yeah, we did some barrel tasting. They’re really slutty right now.”

I stopped what I was doing. “Did you say ’slutty?’”

He drops the phone long enough to say, “Yeah. Like California wines. Big, cheap, flashy… you know, bimbos.”

And people think the wine business is so glamorous.

We just returned from the winebar Vino, run by Rob’s old chum Chuck Furuya. May I say, that if you are in Honolulu and want to have a nice range of wines and a pleasant evening, go to Vino. We’re hoping to take Rob’s folks back to the main restaurant, Hiroshi’s on Saturday.

We also went to the Honolulu Academy of the Arts today, which is always gratifying. They had an exhibit on Wearing Propaganda which dealt with the textiles surrounding WWII in Japan, Britain and the US. Very interesting stuff which will doubtless turn up in a story at some point. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever thought about how the textile designs of a region would be affected in a time of war.

It was particularly intersting because we had gone to see the USS Arizona Memorial yesterday. We can see the memorial from Rob’s folks’ window, but I knew embarrasingly little about it. I knew it was a memorial to a battleship that went down during the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t realize that it was the final resting place for over 1000 people. Learning this during a film right before going out to the ship was, um, a little unsettling. My expectations had been based on my previous experience with touring a battleship in Wilmington. To say the least that visiting a battleship which has been decommisioned is nothing like visiting one that sank under fire with her crew. I was not prepared. Nor was I prepared for the film with footage of the ship exploding. Definitely go when you visit Oahu, but just know that you are visiting a graveyard.

I think that catches you up on the past two days.

My husband and his friend stand in the kitchen talking about wine. I’m typing and I hear his friend says, “It’s a little dumb on the nose.”

This makes me laugh. It’s not quite as good as the time someone sniffed a glass, looked intently across the room and said, “I smell stress.” I wondered if he could smell fear as well.

I made it back with no trouble. Rob and I went to go pick up some of his wine in McMinnville, so he could do some deliveries. Now, I’m off to the pharmacy, because he went and got a headcold while I was gone. Tomorrow we leave for Hawaii.

I’m looking at my suitcase and wondering what security will think of it. For the monkey build, I’m taking my DeWalt radial sander, belt sander, three boxes of industrial hot glue and two shafts of nylon for milling parts. My other checked bag contains 8 bottles of Frameworks Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and a roll of 1/2 inch reticulated foam.

My clothes are in my carry-on bag.

For those keeping track, I leave Portland at 5:30am and arrive at JFK at 4:45 tonight. A car service will take me into the City to the studio to drop off the tools.