26 Mar 2014 A wine tip that snobs would choke on
Add a pinch of salt.
Myhrvold – who holds degrees in mathematics, geophysics and space physics from UCLA, as well as a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a master’s degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University – made the discovery after a few glasses of wine at a dinner.
“I was sitting next to Gina Gallo, from the Gallo wine-making family,” Myhrvold said in an interview in London. “She’s telling me what she values in a cabernet is the savoury tones, so she tries not to have them be sweet or too fruity.
‘‘I’d had enough wine by this point that I was a little incautious. I said, ‘I can make it more savoury.’ So I added a little salt to the wine. There’s nothing I could have done that would have shocked her so much.” She then grabbed the glass from his hand, he recalls, and said ‘It totally changes it.’’
“I start by adding just a tiny pinch and what it does is to balance the flavours. With most wines, they immediately taste smoother. We have many different types of flavour receptors.
‘‘People say there’s sweet, sour, bitter, umami. In reality, there are at least 40 types of receptors and probably more. When you taste something, you have this cacophony of different tastes and your brain tries to summarise that. A tiny bit of salt changes the overall impression, which is why chefs salt food.’’
Emily O’Hare, a sommelier at the River Cafe, London, says this isn’t something she would try: ‘‘The wine is the expression of the winemaker and I wouldn’t alter it. It would be like seasoning food without trusting the chef. But it makes sense. If you eat salty food, it improves lighter, cheaper red wines. If you bite into a lemon, red wine tastes fruitier and less acidic.”
A maverick approach
Myhrvold came to the attention of the food world in 2011 with “Modernist Cuisine,” a six-volume work on the science of cooking that runs to 2,400 pages. He followed that with “Modernist Cuisine at Home” and, last year, with “The Photography of Modernist Cuisine.” Pursuing his diverse interests, he recently wrote a paper on dinosaur growth rates.
Myhrvold’s approach can be iconoclastic. Instead of decanting wines in the conventional way, he suggests blasting them in a kitchen blender for about half a minute:
“When you decant you’re doing two things,” he says. “You’re taking oxygen from the air and oxidizing some of the compounds in the wine; you’re also allowing the wine to off-gas. Typically, there’s going to be sulphur dioxide, which comes from the sulphites they use. You get that out.
‘‘I thought, ‘We can turbocharge this.’ So I put it into a blender, and I would say there’s two reasons to do that. One is that it’s a better form of decanting. The second reason is the look on people’s faces. It is such sacrilege for wine snobs.”…..