The Wine Goes In, and the Nerd Comes Out

While cleaning my room -- today's main form of productination (productive procrastination... critical skill to develop in med school) -- I came across the Wine 101 Notes I took in August. My fellow med ladies and I decided to treat ourselves to a wine tasting seminar before school started.

The paper has a few "Basic Wine Questions" to consider when picking out a wine, and outlines how to use each of your senses, in order to have the full wine experience. It was an awesome class that we found on Living Social, so that made it all the better, as we could actually afford to go -- courtesy of the Monopoly Money the government throws at us (Monopoly Money: money that we never see... money that just magically appears in our bank accounts... thousands of dollars at a time... every time we pass 'Go' ... aka every time a new semester begins... we have tons of it, but it will inevitably get us in trouble because we will have to pay it back 3-fold someday... instead of actually buying Boardwalk -- like all our friends think we will do -- we will be in stuck in monetary jail... with no free pass... the good thing is, we really don't have a lot of time to spend all of it anyway... the bad thing is, we have no other income so it all gets spent eventually). 

The lady leading the wine course encourages everybody to take notes. And, being the diligent students that we are, we did not let her down.


Asian --> turns red --> Histamine reaction

Sight: Look at three factors: appearance, color (Cloudy = bacteria!!!) and body (weight).

Dry wine = no CHO

Tannins (in skin of grapes) decrease bitterness with cheese. Skin = vitamins.

Four enemies of wine:
1. Air - ferment
2. Light - volatile
3. Heat
4. Corks - oxidation (it's actually better to have screw-on caps!)

Smell: Stir --> oxidize --> ester --> aromatic      
(My personal favorite. The only thing that would have made this better was if I would have actually drawn the structures... and believe me... they were dancing around in my head.)

Oak barrel --> heat + CO2 + EtOH

Basically, we somehow managed to turn our entire wine tasting seminar into an Organic Chemistry review session.  

Below is one of my fave wine labels, Educated Guess! See? We aren't the only ones who turn wine into OChem! At least these people profit!!! Salute!

One of my fave wine labels!!! Educated Guess! See? We aren't the only ones who turn wine into OChem! At least these people profit!!!