DailyDirt: Red, Red Wine...
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Alcoholic beverages have been part of human culture for thousands of years. But what do we really know about these drinks? Red wine goes with red meats, and white wine goes with fish... Liquor before beer, you're in the clear... Here are just a few more interesting tidbits of information regarding ethyl alcohol.- A group of Japanese physicists discovered that red wine could induce superconductivity in an iron telluride -- so they tried a bunch of other alcoholic beverages like sake, beer and white wine to try to figure out what was going on. The researchers found that more tartaric acid in red wine correlated well with the superconductive state, but the alcohol also played some role. With just a bit more study, red wine will solve all of our energy problems and allow us to live forever.... [url]
- University of Connecticut wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data on the benefits of resveratrol, so there's some doubt that this component of red wine has as many magical health benefits as some have reported. Still, the anecdotal evidence behind the "French Paradox" makes people think red wine has more than a correlation with a lower incidence of heart disease (even if there's no causal relationship). [url]
- The 'drunken monkey hypothesis' proposes that humans like alcohol because our primate ancestors were highly dependent on fruits in their diet... and ethanol can be found in overripe fruits. But did those drunken monkeys exhibit superior Kung Fu skills? [url]
- You might think that wine experts can tell the difference between an expensive French wine and a much cheaper wine from New Jersey, but you'd be mostly wrong. Wine tasting is hard. Sometimes experts can't even tell the difference between red and white wines -- and the perception of wine can be influenced significantly by the label on the bottle. [url]
Filed Under: alcohol, beverages, drink, food, french paradox, liquor, resveratrol, superconductivity, tartaric acid, taste, wine