Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Ridge Lytton Springs (Dry Creek Valley) 2001

When European wine snobs tell us that Zinfandel is incapable of producing great wine, this exceptional wine will be Exhibit A in the pro-Zinfandel case. At age 7+, it is moving into prime drinking territory. That’s late for Zinfandel, which is usually at its prime at age 4-8, but Zinfandel from a great vineyard in a great year is capable of becoming something very special. Lytton Springs, of couse, is one of America’s great Zinfandel vineyards and 2001 was an exceptional year for Zinfandel in the North Coast. The combination is exceptional. Bright fruit flavors mix with brambles and a very prominent dose of black pepper. Spicy, fruity, and tasty. It will be interesting to watch this wine continue to age (I’m lucky enough to have half-a-dozen bottles in the cellar). Although Zinfandel usually just gets older rather than evolving, truly prime Zinfandel like this is capable of maturing into something like an old claret with enough time.  I vividly recall tasting Ridge’s 1973 Langtry Zinfandel in 1994, when it reminded me of a mature St Julien. In 2022, when the Lytton is 21 years old, I’ll be 64, so the odds are fair that I’ll be around to see if this wine develops as well as the Langtry did. Grade: A

Grilled Boneless Leg of Lamb in Hoisin BBQ Sauce

For two good eaters.

• 2 pounds boneless leg of lamb


• ¼ cup Hoisin sauce


• 3 cloves garlic crushed


• 1 tablespoon chili garlic sauce


• 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar


• 2 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce


• 1 tablespoon honey


• 1 tablespoon ketchup


• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper


• pinch sea salt


• 2 cloves garlic sliced lengthwise thinly


• salt and pepper

In a small bowl, combine Hoisin sauce, crushed garlic, chili garlic sauce, vinegar, soy sauce, honey, ketchup, salt and pepper. Mix well. With a sharp paring knife make small cuts all over lamb. Push garlic slices into holes. Season lamb with salt and pepper, rubbing in. Put lamb in a 1 gallon zip lock plastic bag and pour BBQ sauce over. Squeeze air out and put in refriegerator for 6-8 hours.

Make smoker pouch by combining 2 parts soaked pecan wood chips and 1 part dry pecan wood sawdust in foil, folding ends and sides over to make a pouch. Poke a few holes in pouch and place on the flavorizer bars of your grill. Turn heat on all burners to high. Let the grill heat until you smell smoke. Put lamb in the middle of the grill grate, meat side down. Sear for two minutes. Flip. Sear two minutes. Turn middle burner off. Close lid and cook 8 minutes. Flip lamb. Cook 8 more minutes. Check with instant read thermometer. You want the lamb around 125°, so that carry over will take it to perfectly medium-rare. Remove to cutting board, tent lightly with foil, allow to rest 10 minutes, slice thinly and serve with lentils and squash. Drink a California Cabernet Sauvignon with some age.

Lentils and Squash

• ¼ cup green lentils, picked over and rinsed


• 1 tablespoon olive oil


• 2 medium shallots, minced


• 3 cloves garlic, minced


• ½ teaspoon sea salt


• ¼ teaspoon ground white pepper


• ½ teaspoon garam masala


• ¼ cup crushed pecans


• 1 package frozen Cascadian Farms organic winter squash, thawed


• ½ cup corn kernels
• juice of 1 lime

In a 2-qt saucier pan, bring 2 cups of water to a boil. Add lentils, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook 15 minutes. Drain and set lentils aside.

Give saucier pan a quick cleaning. Preheat pan over medium heat. Add olive oil. When oil is hot, add shallots and garlic. Cook 2 minutes, stirring often. Add salt, pepper, and garam masala. Cook 1 minute, stirring often. Add pecans. Cook 1 minute, stirring often. Add squash. Cook 2 minutes, stirring often. Add corn and lentils. Cook until heated through. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.

You can use frozen corn kernels if necessary, but I had grilled corn on the cob leftover from the night before and cut off the kernels for this purpose.

I did the whole thing outside, using the side burner of my gas grill for the lentils.

Pine Ridge Cabernet Franc (Napa Valley) 2000

This wine had no faults, but it also had no personality. Light body and generic red and black fruit flavors added up to an inoffensive but inconsequential wine. Grade: C

Behrens & Hitchcock Petit Verdot (Napa Valley) 2000

In both its Bordeaux homeland and California, Petit Verdot is almost always used as a blending grape rather than being vinified as a varietal wine.

The Petit Verdot grape variety is one of the six approved grapes for making red wines in the Bordeaux region of France. It is usually used as you would use a spice in cooking because a little bit goes a long way. Petit Verdot will often be blended as 1% to 3% of the total wine in order to take advantage of some of its most dominant characteristics. Petit Verdot has very deep purple color and a strong tannin structure. It is usually used to impart these features to the wine into which it is blended. Because Petit Verdot tends to ripen late in the season and is often lost to rains during harvest, it is following another variety, Carmenere, into near extinction in the Bordeaux region. (Link)

In 2000, however, Behrens & Hitchcock bottled a small lot of Petit Verdot. I believe this was a one time event. Given the high quality of this wine, that’s a very sad thing. It’s still a deep, deep purple that’s faded hardly at all. The bouquet is impressive, with blackberry, violets, and leather. On the palate, it suggests blackberry, white pepper, vanilla, and mocha java. Despite being almost 8 years old, it is still pretty firm with plenty of tannins. It likely would have aged another 8 years with no problems. Grade: A-

No Beer, No Civilization? No Way!

George Will’s latest column claims ”No Beer, No Civilization.”

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson’s marvelous 2006 book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.” It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol—in beer and, later, wine—which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process. ...

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had—what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors—by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

All well and good, but it is likely that the earliest drinkers - from whom we are all apparently descended - were drinking wine (albeit not necessarily grape wine) rather than beer.

Lee Berger is “is a paleoanthropologist, physical anthropologist and archeologist and is best known for his work on Australopithecus africanus body proportions and the Taung Bird of Prey Hypothesis.” In his paper, Wine at the Dawn of Civilization, Berger explains that:

Fermentation is, of course, the process that produces certain alcoholic beverages like wine and beer. In general terms, fermentation is the breaking down of complex organic substances into simple organic substances. During the process, waste products are produced. The waste product most important for the production of consumable alcoholic beverages is ethyl alcohol. Fermentation to produce ethyl alcohol requires the presence of yeasts. For barley and other grains to ferment, yeasts must be introduced. In early societies, men and women may have accomplished this by adding human saliva, a good source of natural yeasts, to the mash by chewing grains and then spitting them into a container to ferment. Grapes and many other fruits, however, have yeasts naturally growing on their skins, so that with no additives and thus no deliberate input by humans, grape juice will turn into wine if just left to sit. This natural advantage over grains makes it likely that fruit-based beverages like wine were the first intoxicating beverages to be used by humans.

In Africa, where I conduct my explorations into human origins, many fruiting trees have natural yeasts present. Under certain conditions, these fruits ferment when they fall to the ground. One such tree, the marula, is legendary as a source of naturally occurring fermented alcohol. The legend, unfortunately, stems from filmed demonstrations made many years ago of cavorting monkeys and staggering elephants dining on fermented marula fruits; these were thought to be staged, but more recent studies have confirmed that many animals in Africa deliberately seek out fermented fruits in order to become intoxicated, and primates are among the most frequent elbow-benders. ...

So was the origin of civilization bound to the fermentation of grapes and the making of wine? Certainly the timing is right, and as I mentioned, humans and our ancestors have probably been seeking out ways of accessing fermented fruits for their intoxicating effects in Africa for tens of thousands, if not millions, of years. It really is not too much of a scientific leap of faith to suggest that once humans had conducted these early chemistry experiments and could control the process of fermentation, that it, along with complex changes in social organization, may have provided a critical stimulus to the development of the first permanent settlements, and then to extensive trade routes to allow the effective sharing of the product of the grape.

No wine, no civilization. 

Cork and the Environment

Cork’s use as a wine stopper turns out to have important environmental benefits, because it keeps large cork forests from being cleared for other uses. According to Susan McGrath (HT: Andrew Sullivan), this is important because those forests provide key habitats for lots of endangered species:

“Because the native cork-oak woodlands around the western Mediterranean were never completely cleared, they still have some of the richest biological diversity in the Mediterranean,” says Jose Tavares, Portugal program manager for the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). More than 100 songbird species breed in the montados, he says, including the brilliant, hummingbird-like bee-eaters; hawfinches and chaffinches, with their seed-cracker bills; and big, azure-winged magpies, little rock buntings, and cirl buntings. More than 160 other birds occur here, including many species that overwinter, such as lapwings and golden plovers; millions of wood pigeons and doves, from all across Eurasia; booted eagles and short-toed eagles, honey buzzards and black kites. A handful of very rare species find refuge here, too. Iberian mixed oak forests support the majority of Europe’s Bonelli’s eagles (now numbering fewer than 1,000 pairs), the last 180 breeding pairs of Spanish imperial eagles, and fewer than 100 Iberian lynx. Cork-oak forests across the Mediterranean, in Algeria and Tunisia, harbor some of the world’s last Barbary deer.

So should we continue to put up with TCS contamination and resulting corked wines in order to preserve the Portugese equivalent of the spotted owl? The greens thinks so:

“The cork oak forests could face an economic and environmental crisis unless we take action to secure their future now,” said Rebecca May, a forests campaigner at with WWF-UK. “It is vital that the wine and cork industries maintain the market for cork stoppers and in turn, help ensure the survival of the cork oak forests.”

Want to bet Ms May drinks green tea rather than claret?

To me, this is an easy question.

In my column, The Turn of the Screw, I came down strongly on the side of switching from corks to screw caps (more precisely, the Stelvin closure).

In my experience, wines capped with screw tops taste just as good as those closed with corks and, of course, loads better than those closed with tainted corks.

Despite the cork industry propaganda McGrath uncritically passes on, and despite the admitted progress that some cork producers have made, cork taint remains real and a very serious problem. As I wrote in the TCS column, hyper-sensitive wine critic James Laube’s estimate that 15% of bottles are cork tainted seems way too high, but the International Herald Tribune last year reported that cork taint used to be as high as 12%. According to the report, the cork industry claims to have reduced cork taint by 90%, but even if that’s true 10% of 12% is 1.2%, which means that in the best case scenario more than 1 bottle in a hundred will have to go down the drain. Neutral estimates, moreover, put the current percentage of bottles tainted by TCA from corks at 2 to 8%. So 5% wouldn’t be a bad guess.

So I say that, if the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wants to save Portugese cork forests, let them buy up the forest land and put it into some sort of nature conservancy trust. Or let the Portugese government turn them into national parks. After all, it was decades of lousy farming and manufacturing techniques by Portugese cork growers that made cork taint such a widespread problem. Even so, I’d even be willing to donate a few bucks to the cause. But pouring up to 5% of my wine collection down the drain because of bad corks is not a price I’m willing to pay to save some Portugese hawfinches or, for that matter, chaffinches.

Wine Tasting Sketch

The brilliant British comedy team of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry do a wine tasting sketch:

Grilling: Charcoal or Gas?

Over at my punditry blog, I explain why I’ve settled on a natural gas grill.