Facepalm: the physical gesture of placing one's hand flat across one's face or lowering one's face into one's hand or hands. The gesture is found in many cultures as a display of frustration, embarrassment, shock, or surprise.

Last night I went out to see a movie with my wife. She enjoys loud, shout-y, explode-y action-adventure flicks, and while I prefer a well-nuanced dramatic movie about human feelings and emotional growth, but I'm willing to indulge her any time she'll go on a date with me. However, I have a lot of trouble with the movie experience, partly because of theatres themselves: if I want to cram myself into a confined space with bad seats, no legroom, stinky and inconsiderate strangers and horrifyingly dirty bathrooms, I'll book an airline ticket.

The other part of the problem relates to those stinky, inconsiderate strangers, particularly three groups:

1. People who bring small children (or worse, infants) to late movies filled with explode-y stuff and fast, violent imagery unsuitable for them.
2. People who will not shut up, either holding a conversation irrelevant to the movie or narrating it.
3. Anybody who uses a cell phone in any way, for any purpose during the movie.

Before any parents get angry, note that I don't go to movies before 9 pm--citizens in the single-digit age category should be in bed in the single-digit hour category. I'm not saying people with kids shouldn't be free to attend movies, but I am saying that keeping a toddler or infant up past a reasonable bedtime, and filling its tender noggin with explosions, monsters, and violent imagery doesn't seem like parent-of-the-year behaviour to me, and there's no way the poor things can sit quietly for two hours anyway.

This past week I heard an advertisement for a new kind of movie experience: VIP theatres. The pitch on the radio ad tried to highlight the value-added aspects of the experience (a bar selling alcohol beverages! Order pizza and snacks at your seats!) but I'm really too cheap to buy nine-dollar beers, so what caught my attention were three key elements to the experience: large seats with lots of legroom and space, 19 years and older only, and pre-order and select your seat. The VIP experience also had some decent features--separate bathrooms, print your ticket ahead of time and breeze through to the auditorium. Keen!

Having gone to the theatre last night, I can recommend VIP as an alternative to traditional movie-going. It was all as advertised: old cranky people like me, not a single cell-phone ring or dullard's narrative effort, and the seats we pre-chose were our favorites (three rows back from the screen, middle) and were quite roomy and comfortable--in particular, not having to share an armrest made me much more relaxed.

But I strongly doubt I'll do it again. Because of cineplex.com, and the insanely difficult, non-intuitive way they handled the ticket sales. If there had been an executive from the Cineplex company in my house Friday night through Saturday afternoon (the period in which I repeatedly attempted to buy tickets) I would have wound up repeatedly punching him in the groin so he could share the pain I felt trying to use his website. Not that it's the worst website in the world. In fact, it's probably pretty much the standard for many large-corporation web-sale portals. And that's the real problem: corporations never, ever get the point that they need to sell things. They always want to 'develop a consumer relationship' or 'create touchpoints', or 'enhance the user experience'. The kind of corporate officer that approved that website has never bought theatre tickets over the internet: in his rarefied air of stock options and feeding champagne to his racehorses, he has people for that. Thus, if the user experience feels like getting mugged for trying to hand money over to his corporation, why should he care?

My problem was pretty simple. I did a web search on 'silver city cinemas coquitlam'. I clicked on the first search result, here. I had a quick look and went to click on the 'VIP' link in the menu bar, but instead of taking me to the actual VIP theatre site at my chosen location, it kicked me to this page, which forced me to search a crowded, busy, graphics-intensive page for the Coquitlam cinema--the site that I had just been at! And the upper half of the page, the part where you automatically start looking for your goal, the link that will let you buy the tickets you've already decided on, is occupied by a corny graphical ad that only a senior VP of tastelessness could love. Space bar to scroll down, and I find the VIP link back to Silver City Coquitlam. There is an awful lot of irrelevant crap all over the page, but I sorted out the visual noise and persevered, and clicked the Silver City Coquitlam link, going through to . . . the exact page I had been at one click ago! Cue facepalm #1.

The link wasn't the VIP link I had been lead to believe: it was a connection to the general page for the theatre. Why? What logic is it that there's a link to something you need on the page that you need, only to find out it's an advertisement for that thing, and leads you back where you belonged? Because Cineplex doesn't get a single thing about consumer purchase behavior, that's why, and none of the people who approved this site have ever bought anything on-line.

Next step I figured that the VIP thingy was somewhere on the home page for the Coquitlam Cinemas. So I went a-scrollin', down to here:

 

So tell me where you would click to buy a VIP ticket? It's not immediately apparent, because designation is inside parentheses '(VIP 19+)', followed by 'NO PASSES'. Does that mean that there's no VIP tickets? Why is the date first--they only sell the tickets on the day of the showing, after all. Why are some of the show-times present as text but not links? Why would the time be up there if I can't buy it? Where's the category for me, the notional VIP purchaser? After considering these options philosophically for a little while (one dram of Scotch, to be precise) I clicked on the first one, hitting the 10:20 pm link, hoping for the best. Here's what I got.

Fine, I guessed right. But now I've got a bunch of issues. First, I've only got 5 minutes to complete each screen hereafter, or I get kicked off and have to start again. This is probably so that reserved seats don't get hung up when somebody forgets and leaves their browser open while they play Angry Birds or go get a snack. But 5 minutes . . . what if I have an argument with my wife whose credit card we're going to use, or if I have to catch my cat because he's murdering a seagull on my favorite bedspread (hey, your homelife has quirks too). Fine, I'll stay focused and hurry so as not to tie up seats, but more on this later. One more thing: try hitting 'back' on your browser once you're on their website. They've set it up so you can't do that--if you want to get away from this site you've either got to open a new tab, open a new browser window, or open up the 'back' arrow on your navigation bar and choose a destination three back from where you are now. This is what it technically known as a CDM (Complete Dick Move). The only people who try to prevent you from backing out of a commercial transaction where you've not already made a legally recognised and enforceable commitment to make a purchase are time-share salesman and con-artists (but I repeat myself). It's a shameful way to conduct business and it instantly boils my blood--if it was a storefront the VP of cineplex.com would be standing between you and the door, toothpick in the corner of his mouth, sneering at you, 'Where do you think you're goin', bub?'

Next, I have to print out the ticket at home for it to be useful. Even if I've reserved and paid, unless I've got a printed ticket in hand I can't go into the cinema, and Purchases are non-refundable, meaning, do it our way or we'll keep your money and snidely point to this warning. Hmm, I don't print a ton of stuff at home, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Then comes the first corporate intrusion. I don't set up on-line accounts because in all of them, somewhere in the EULA, they install a permanent tracking link, kind of a super-cookie that follows your every move thereafter on the computer and use the data to either target you for advertising, sell your consumer information to other marketers, or target your relatives for kidnapping and assassination (foolish exaggeration? You've never read that EULA from beginning to end, have you? If you sign one and the company comes to your house and your head winds up pickled in a jar in a Tijuana sideshow, it's legal because you agreed to it when you signed their EULA).

Off I went to proceed to checkout, fully expecting to give money and get ticket. Ha ha ha, what an optimist! Just because they say you're going to the checkout, that doesn't mean they're finished abusing your trust as a consumer, oh no! Instead, you get this:

 

Cue facepalm #2. Another bunch of corporate marketing dickery. After promising me that I'll get to go to the checkout, they betray my trust by shilling me to sign up for their loyalty program. Note that signing up for such things subjects you to even worse invasion of privacy than clicking on that EULA did. You can wave goodbye to any notion of personal privacy ever again, and your wedding pictures will wind up on boxes of popcorn sold at Cineplex and your pets will be sold for animal testing. So the question is, do I skip SCENE & Proceed With Checkout, or do I just Proceed With Checkout? By this time I am functionally insane: I keep clicking on the same link, hoping for a different result. Rather than actually getting to check out my purchase, I get this:

Nope, not allowed to check out yet. Rather than have all vouchers, loyalty programs, gift certificates, etc all on one page, they've got another screen between me and giving them money. I put in for two tickets and do my insane-monkey-pulling-the-same-lever-hoping-for-a-different-result schtick and get this:

Okay, looks like the home stretch. I get to confirm my purchase and pick my seats. Except they seem to have assigned them to me instead of letting me pick. After a minute to read the screen I realised I had to un-click the mustard-coloured seats before I could choose my actual seats. For what reason might a web designer added this function? If this screen is in place to let you select seats (as the little note on top says) then why do they force you to unselect a seat in order to select one? Don't worry, that's a rhetorical question. Captain Corporate would tell you it was to assign the best remaining seats to consumers who don't wish to go to the trouble of selecting for themselves. The truth is, it's a chunk of functionality that his nephew, the web designer stuck in so that he could demonstrate his status as chief HTML monkey. Nephew may never have actually worked in any kind of retail environment, or engage in other human activities like bathing, speaking in complete sentences or interacting with live humans, but, by jaysus, he can lard in irrelevant features with the best of them! By this time I want to kill everyone in human history who ever worked for Cineplex, the Internet or any kind of entertainment ever, including cave-painting, Punch and Judy shows and kazoo recitals.

Eventually, somewhat before the Xanax and whisky ran out and my brains exploded, I chose some seats and moved on to a fairly normal payment screen, complete with 'Verified by Visa'. Although they try a few more things to get me to buy into some of their nonsense, I get the thrill of anticipation that I might be able to pay and go back to what I was doing before this notion of going to a movie popped up and ruined my afternoon. They want your email address, but you can actually count on their promise not to use it for nefarious purposes--that's actually rather naughty under Canadian law.

So I proceed to checkout, where I have a small issue. I have more than one credit card, used for various business and personal purposes. I update my passwords every 90 days, and the ones I use are considered 'very strong', which means they're complicated and easy to screw up when you enter the long string of letters, digits, punctuation marks and whatever other options the encryption service lets me use. When entering my credit card info for my personal card I got it wrong three times in a row, and got locked out of they system. Meh, my bad, but not critical, because I've got another card. However, because fiddling around with cards timed me out I had to go back and re-navigate those screens all over again. Cue facepalm #3. By now my face and palm were getting calloused.

When I finally got to the seat choice screen again the seats I wanted were shown as occupied. In an hour of fiddling around and repeating my choices, no seats had been updated or shown as chosen. Suddenly, after I chose them, my personal favorite seats are gone and unavailable . . . and not another single seat has been sold. I rapidly concluded that some part of the functionless, clueless web design had reserved my seats, but was too stupid to unreserve them when I couldn't pay. They were locked off to me, and even though I was technically the one who had reserved them, I couldn't pay for them now, nor get access to them through any means I could figure out. My arm was now too tired for facepalming. I was reduced to irritable whimpers.

And here's the kicker. Look at that price: thirty-nine bucks. For a movie. But I want to pay it because I want my three consumer desires (no babies, no chatter, no cell phones) satisfied. That's what I've been promised, but that's not what Cineplex wants to give me. They want to give me loyalty programs, sign-ups, intrusive accounts and seats they assign, not seats I choose. Forty bucks, more-or-less and I'm not getting what I want in any hurry, even though I have been trying as hard as I know how to for a very long, frustrating time to force my money into their hands, and they keep dodging, obfuscating, counter-offering and trying to get me to do things I have no interest in.

Finally, I chose my second-best seats and paid with a credit card that I could remember the password to. Then I went to print the tickets. Remember, no printy = no goey to the showy. I have two printers at home, one of which isn't working (I use the attached scanner) and another that works but is an ink-hog. After going out and buying a new ink cartridge, I finally printed off my ticket. But why, really? Why couldn't they simply send a copy of the bar code on the ticket or a QR code to my email address or my smart-phone where I could then display it from my phone at the theatre and get in without murdering trees for a ticket that goes straight into the garbage one second after I get into the theatre?

Because they don't care what kind of experience I have--or at least it's never occurred to them to think about it. After they've got my money, they tell me it's non-refundable, even if my printer explodes and I can't get to another one and use it by showtime. Yes, I acknowledge it: this is a self-inflicted problem. But isn't the point that you should make your process as consumer-friendly as possible, including accounting for the kind of problems your consumers might commonly have (such as bad printers)? Or is the goal for Cineplex to abuse their consumers to the point of enraging them while standing back cooly and announcing, 'We have your money. Screw you, loser.'

I stewed about this for the last 24 hours, and talked to a couple of friends in the retail sector about it. This kind of thing is actually common--try buying a high-ticket consumer good in a mass-market store and you'll see. I was buying a good set of stereo speakers a few years ago and I swear, I went in to three stores where I announced that I wished to purchase a specific, expensive speaker model, and asked if they could deliver it today. At two of the stores the salesdrones actually said, 'Those are really expensive--are you sure those are the ones you want?'.

 

Think that through: I came in and announced that they had made a sale, closed the deal and asked for a delivery slot. And then they stood in my way, refusing to take my money--and it wasn't chump change, more like a sale the clerk could brag about around the water cooler. And this isn't uncommon! Everyone I know has a similar story where they've gone into an establishment trying to buy something, only to be frustrated by the very people that were supposed to complete their transactions.

Which leads me to something I heard decades ago, back when I worked in a bank. We had a security lecture, delivered by a former con-man who had specialised in hitting banks, getting away with big hauls. Reformed, he told us how to spot scams. Afterwards I asked him a couple of questions about how he made what, in the cold light of day, were patently ridiculous schemes. First, he told me, don't give too many details: offer something too good to be true and the mark will paper over any ridiculous plot holes with their own imagination--much as I papered over the obvious opportunities this online process affords Cineplex to frustrate me in my desire to have a good theatre-going experience.

But the second thing he said always stuck with me. Verbatim, 'Always make it as easy as possible for the mark to give you the money. Never put any impediment in the way of the money getting into your pocket.' Not just an aphorism for con-men, it's a great philosophy for businesses of all kinds: don't prevent your customers from giving you money--duh. But this simple truism hit home a lot harder just a few days ago when I read an article in Fast Company by Aaron Levie, The Simplicity Thesis. Here's where Levie's rubber meets the road:

Any market where unnecessary middlemen stand between customers and their successful use of a solution is about to be disrupted. Any service putting the burden on end users to string together multiple applications to produce the final working solution should consider its days numbered. Any product with an interface that slows people down is ripe for extinction.

He's absolutely right. In this crazy-fast changing world, you make your customer work any harder than not-hard-at-all and they're going to take the first alternative to your product or service that demands less, and has greater simplicity. And so they should. he even gives a 5-point plan to reduce complexity:

1. Think end to end.  Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
2. Say no.  Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
3. Specialize.  Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest--simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
4. Focus on details.  Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
5. Audit constantly.  Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.

If Cineplex just did #1 and #4, they'd win my heart in a . . . well, in a heartbeat. Because I really want to love the concept.

And so we come to 'Where does that leave Tim?' Well, I did go to the theatre, eventually, and I did enjoy the service I purchased--big comfy seats, didn't have to share an armrest (an issue when you're as wide as a phone booth) no cell phones or crying babies and an easy check-in and walk through the nicely appointed theatre--the bathrooms were pristinely clean and well stocked--I went twice (shouldn't drink tea before a long movie) and each time it looked like I was the first person to ever use the loo--amazing, considering how terrible theatre washrooms usually are.

But I seriously don't think I'll go again. The downright abusive nature of the user purchase interface leaves me uninterested in keeping Cineplex in business. I'm probably going to go back to waiting several months for the consumer release of the movie, and watch it in my living room--I have a nice TV, a comfy couch that I only have to share with people I love, clean bathrooms and the beer is a lot cheaper. Too bad, because when there's a better user experience, I am one of the first to glom onto it: when bars in Vancouver went smoke-free, I started going, for the first time in decades. But nobody ever made me kill an afternoon buying a ticket to a bar with an intrusive, abusive user interface, because they knew better.

The other place it leaves me is in communication with the Cineplex folks. I'm hoping they'll reply to my inquiry with some sort of an explanation. If they come through, I'll post it here.

How about you folks? Is there a product or a service you really want to patronise, but simply can't because of the impediments the company puts in your way? What would you do to improve their offering? And did you complain, or just take your money elsewhere--or nowhere at all?

 One last thing: those seats that I couldn't re-reserve? Nobody sat in them. Sigh.

I love beer. This admission will come as no surprised to people who follow me on Twitter (@WinexpertTim) or on Facebook, where about half of my pictures are of beers I'm currently drinking, planning to drink or have drank. 

But really, I love beer. Most guys say that, but I suspect they don't really mean it and are just trying to get beer to go to bed with them. For me it's a deep and meaningful love, one that brought me to homebrewing and the career I have immersed myself in for nearly three decades now. And I not only love beer, I love the culture that surrounds people who love it as much as I do, the craftbrewers and homebrewers who pour their passion into their bottles and kegs, and then share it with everyone around them. I can honestly say I have never met a mean-spirited or selfish homebrewer in my life--the joy that making your own beer brings into your world makes you eager to share it with anyone smart enough to accept a bottle from your eager hands.

But there are people out there who don't like beer. They like money. And they hate anyone who interferes with their ability to make as much money as possible, by means ill or good. One of those people is Diageo Brands. (Note that this is the literal truth: according to law, corporations are people. This confuses me as I have yet to punch a corporation in the nose, but I'm still hopeful.)

Where this all stems from is one of my favorite little breweries, Brew Dog. A wee Scottish brewery founded by a couple of cheeky lads with good brewing skills and a keen sense of fun, along with a nose for good guerrilla marketing, they make some very fine (and very distinctive) beers. They mainly make varieties that no corporate beer giant would touch with a million-mile long pole: ultra-high alcohol barley wines, stout beers aged in single malt whisky casks, punishingly hoppy IPA, etc., all of which are right up my libational alley. 

The sourness in the pint all started Sunday, May 6th at the British Institute of Innkeeping's award ceremony. The BII is a trade association that both Brew Dog and Diageo belong to--a common enough thing in any industry. As is usual, the bigger the player in the trade group, the more money they bring to the table, and the more weight they swing with the officers of the association. 

At the ceremony the BII's independent judges were going to award BrewDog a prize--Bar Operator of the Year, for their taphouse attached to the brewery. However, just before the ceremony was to start, Diageo found out that the award wasn't going to a Diageo affiliated bar.

The Diageo people, including a senior corporate officer of the company, a man with 20 years as a key member of the upper management, went absolutely insane, and said that they would cease all sponsorship of BII events unless the prize was given to the establishment they chose. The institute caved, and handed it over to Diageo's choice. 

Imagine you're BrewDog and have been told in advance that you'd won, sitting at your table, watching as a competitor accepts an award that has 'BREWDOG: BAR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR' right on the little brass plaque on the front. You'd probably be pretty miffed, no? 

Turns out, they were quite miffed indeed. You can read their responses to this issue here, and here. Important tidbit from the association chairman, Kenny Mitchell, who contacted them after the event:

‘We are all ashamed and embarrassed about what happened. The awards have to be an independent process and BrewDog were the clear winner’

‘Diageo (the main sponsor) approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening.’

We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.‘

 The whole incident hasn't gone unnoticed. There was a Twitter blizzard over the incident, and even the BBC felt it necessary to report the ungentlemanly conduct of Diageo brands: 

As a maker and appreciator of good beer, I'm incensed. As a consumer, I'm enraged. When I first started enjoying beer as a wee lad I found out that I was living in a desert: if I wanted something beyond the generic industrial swill offered in the local liquor stores, I had to make it. Heck, even the 'Guinness' (another Diageo brand) back then was generic swill with caramel colouring in it, brewed 'under license' in Canada. So very slowly, over nearly thirty years, Canada has developed a craft beer scene that looks poised to break out all over, and I can drink ten or fifteen locally produced stouts of all kinds, and hundreds of other finely crafted, individual an idiosyncratic styles from all over my province, and all over Canada. 

When a bully corporation, fat, petulant and entitled from the flow of money it believes is a divine gift from god directly to its coffers, tries to steal by coercion the recognition that is due to small, hardworking entrepeneurs like Brew Dog, everyone needs to pay attention. I hate bullies, whether they wear jeans and a wifebeater or a ten thousand dollar tailored suit. The only way to keep them from making everything they touch a misery is to stand up to them and beat them down. I'm leaving directly from work today and buying a couple of cases of Brew Dog beer, and Diageo, well, they can hug their shrinking market share to keep themselves warm. 

Last word should go to the boys at Brew Dog: 

Although we can but speculate as to the reasons for the behaviour we can only assume that even a company as large as Diageo are scared at just how much the beer market is changing. People are now rejecting industrial, generic beers in favour of hand crafted artisanal beers all over the world. The craft beer revolution of America looks set to hit the UK, and it seems the incumbent players are going to use any means possible, including immoral and dishonest methods to stifle competition and desperately cling to market share.

We are now going to move on and forget about all this. We have far more important things to do, like finish building our new brewery and eat sandwiches. Someday we might actually get the award we fairly won. Maybe the Diageo CEO will hand deliver it to us as an apology.  In the meantime we are going to kick back with a beer. It is hard to be a Judas goat when you are drinking a Punk IPA.

Walk tall, kick ass and learn to speak craft beer.

I'll drink to that. 

Happy El Día de la Batalla de Puebla!

Typical of a gringo, I used to assume that Cinco de Mayo was either Mexican independence day, or a holiday invented by the makers of Corona beer. I got curious a few years ago and looked it up. The real idea behind the celebration is much more interesting. Wikipedia covers it nicely, but in a nutshell, the whole thing is fascinating. It is a celebration of the Mexican army over the French at the battle of Puebla, in 1862. The two significant points are the fact that the French were considered the finest fighting force of their time (French military prowess jokes aside) and the Mexicans crushed them like bugs. 

The second factor was that the French were there to try and break up America: Napoleon III was supplying the Confederate rebels, hoping to fracture the American state and leave them vulnerable to French influence. The Mexicans broke them, and the North prevailed over the slavery states, and the US is what it is, partly through the efforts of Valiant Mexican soldiers. 

Who knew? 

Mexicans generally celebrate it as a family holiday, and I think that's a fine idea, and I'm going to raise a glass later today to freedom and democracy and the struggle against the oppressor. 

Hmm. I wonder what kind of wine they drink in the Empire?

Have you ever come across what appear to be tiny flakes or crystals in your wine, or in your bag of juice, or at the bottom of a carboy after racking? Did you wonder if the appearance of this deposit meant that the wine was flawed, or that your equipment might be damaged by it, or (worst of all!) that the wine might not be safe to drink?

There's very good news if you have: the deposit you've seen is wine diamonds, a well-known and well-understood natural phenomenon in winemaking, and one that's been around as long as people have made their own wine--in fact, they have found this residue on wine vessels over ten thousand years old!

Not only is the wine safe to drink, it's going to be delicious, and the crystals themselves are something that most winemakers will have paid for under a different guise (more on that below). But for people not used to seeing any deposit in their bottles, we need to have all the facts.

The crystals are composed of potassium bitartrate (properly, potassium hydrogen tartrate, KC4H5O6) a combination of tartaric acid (naturally occurring in the grapes) and potassium, from soil minerals. All wine develops these crystals, but in the commercial setting it appears and is disposed of in the year to two years it takes to finish a bottle of wine. Kit companies have to go to special effort to get them out, given the short production period of the kits. Mostly this involves lowering the temperature of the juices, as the tartrate crystals form most rapidly at lower temperatures.

Winexpert does tartrate stabilisation on all of our juices, and in our juices that are made into concentrate. We have recently been accessing tartrate bio-reactor technology, which is pretty cool: it's a giant sponge inside a pumping loop. The sponge is saturated with potassium bitartrate seed crystals and the juice is pumped through at freezing and under pressure. One pass can quickly remove the majority of unstable tartrates.

But the more traditional method we use is to simply store all of our raw juices in-house for three months in our cellar, which is held at 4C (38F), with a couple of shovelfuls of seed crystals in the bottom of the 27,000 litre (7100 US-gallon) tanks. When the tanks come empty we have to send a production staffer inside with a snow shovel to clean out the tartrates--sometimes they can be truly stupendous.

Both of these processes can eliminate a lot of tartrates, but don't always get it out completely in pre-fermentation juices in anything shorter than this time window. Where this becomes very tricky is when we've got products from a new harvest coming in on a tight schedule. We blend a kit up and typically one of the components is less than three months in our cellar and still slightly unstable. We (almost always) see this as a dropout in the bag and sometimes more in the carboy, post-fermentation, but very rarely in the finished wine after fining and stabilising.

The other name that tartrate crystals are known under is Cream of Tartar.

A white, colourless and odourless powder, it's usually found in the baking section of your supermarket. It's actually made from wine diamonds harvested from the commercial wine industry. In food preparation it's used to stabilise egg whites (for whipped meringues) and to prevent sugar solutions from crystallising. It is even used to make baking powder when combined with baking soda, and is the principal component of sodium-free salt substitutes.

As far as any health concerns go, tartrate crystals, like commercial cream of tartar are almost completely harmless. If you consume them in very large quantities, they do have a lot of potassium in them, about 500 mg per teaspoon (normal daily requirements are 3500 mg) which can cause stress on the kidneys and in extremely large quantities can cause stomach upset. But let's face it: nobody is going to eat seven teaspoons of tasteless, dry tartrate crystals any more than they would eat seven teaspoons of salt at once!

Once the wine is separated from the crystals, there's no more need to worry about them. And they rinse away easily from equipment and bottles with no further effect. So if you see diamonds, you needn't panic, just take in the majesty of thousands of years of winemaking

Winexpert continues to be first in consumer winemaking innovation! The company that invented the modern wine kit and brought you the world's first premium wine kit (Selection Original),  the first Carbon-Neutral wine kit, the Colour-Match wine kit, the first 80-Proof wine kit and many, many others, now brings you the first consumer-produced energy beverage, Blue Boar Winergy™!

Lynne Sideburns, Chief Product Excitement Officer is elated with the new product launch, noting: "The trend to energy drinks like Red Bull™, Rock Star™ and the like have overwhelmed the specialty refreshment beverage category in the last ten years, but there's never been a way to make your own, until now! And with our exciting array of flavours and styles--Boarberry Blue Blast, Racing Heart Raspberry, Exotic Fruits Jitterjuice, Extreme Elderberry, and Warped White Zinfandel--we have a Blue Boar Energy Beverage for everyone's taste!"

"Energy drinks are a godsend," explains Tim Vandergrift, Winexpert's Manager of Conjectural Technology. "Especially if you're trapped in boring meetings, hour after hour while people drone on and on--who can stay awake for that? In fact, I came up with this idea during a meeting, after falling asleep so deeply that I didn't wake up until it was time to start work again! Ha ha, I miss that job."

Blue Boar is superior to commercial energy drinks because laws limit the amount and type of stimulants that can be added to ready-to-drink beverages, while consumers can customise their desired level of stimulaiton while making the kit. Specially crafted add packs include methylxanthines, B vitamins, guarana, yerba mate, açaí, and taurine, plus various forms of ginseng, maltodextrin, inositol, carnitine, creatine, glucuronolactone, and ginkgo biloba. These can make a mildly stimulating drink when adding 1/8th of the pack (about the same level of alertness you'd get from a cup of tea) all the way to a drink that gives the user a sense of invulnerability, the ability to dance all night long, and an extremely irritating tendency to talk inanely for 16 non-stop hours!

While extremely minor, side effects include include nervousness, irritability, sleeplessness, increased urination, abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmia), dyspepsia, listening to techno music (or in worst cases, dubstep) dry mouth, wet nose, chilblains, rumbling teeth, turophobia (fear of cheese), anterograde amnesia, blurred vision, anosmia (permanent loss of the sense of smell), hallucinations, sleep disorders, and itchy hair.

Blue Boar Energy Beverage will be available for sale April 1st at all Winexpert Retail locations--order yours today!

Greetings from the road--the Silk Road, that is. In case you've been looking for me (curse you, moneylenders) I am in China--the city of Chengdu capital of Sichuan province, to be precise. Sichuan is a pretty interesting place--population somewhere north of 80 million, previously most important as an agriculatural area (peaches, sugar cane and grapeseeds!) it is also home to Sichuan cooking, one of the four great cuisines of China, and to Panda bears.

But you can find all that out on Wikipedia. The reason I'm here is to work the Wine and Alcohol Trade Show with our partners, the Canadian Export Centre. Winexpert has had some interesting times trying to crack the Chinese market--if you've never tried to import and sell things to mainland China, it's complex and sometimes frustrating. By partnering with a dedicated export company we've gotten some really encouraging results. Not that we're on the top of the heap: I counted hundreds of booths at the pre-show (today) and apparently the full show is much bigger and more crowded. I'm not sure how that's possible, but we're explaining the consumer winemaking concept to folks who are also looking at high-volume commercial imports, some of which are very competitively priced.

But that's okay: we have a secret weapon at our booth: me.

I taught my hosts a new term: booth bunny. It's a cynical old trade-show ploy to hire very attractive young women in nice outfits to work at a tradeshow booth so men will be influenced to stop and check you (them) out. But in this case I'm the designated booth-bunny, something that seems to be working. Fortunately it's not my good looks we're exploiting, it's my status as an expert--the definition of which is any guy with a briefcase who is more than 10 miles from home. I've been able to answer some important questions, give some background and generally be the 'factory guy'.

 

The partnership is pretty impressive. Winexpert China (the website is here) has made some very serious investments in this tradeshow, and the brochures, booth, promotional video and website are superb. Today was the pre-show, limited to members of the trade, and we were run off our feet--a good feeling. Tomorrow we move to a convention centre where the real fun begins--it's open to the general public, and crowds are expected to be lined up around the block from opening until close. This will be the first real test-of-concept for consumer winemaking products in China

I'm going to try to blog at least a couple of more times while I'm here--the internets are a bit spotty in China, and that means no Facebook or Twitter, so if anyone wants to mention my blog entries, I'd be most obliged. If you're trying to get hold of me in Canada, I'll be back in the middle of next week--but off to Ottawa immediately after, so write fast.

Okay, there's a Sichuan banquet in my immediate future. Woot!

The one question I get asked more than any other is, 'How can I learn more about wine?'. The answer, of course, is by drinking it. Lots and lots of it.

That's often easier said than (safely) done. You can only taste so many different wines by yourself until your house fills up with opened bottles, each missing only an ounce or two. Even if you invite friends over to play, 'Guess That Wine', there's an upper limit to your space, resources or liver capacity, even if you spit each taste. I try to drink a new bottle of wine every night, but even that gets more difficult--I'm too old to finish a bottle a night, my wife rarely has more than a single taste on a school night, and there's only so much vingegar, wine jelly and sauce reductions one can do with leftovers.

Fortunately, there's an answer: get together with five thousand of your closest chums and attend a wine festival. Big festivals will have hundreds of vineyards and wineries represented, and (most importantly) hundreds of different styles of wine--along with hundreds of exactly the same kind of wine! This is crucial because it not only lets you taste wines you may not encounter in your regular travels (ever had Palo Cortado living in BC? Not unless you were at last year's festival) but also to compare the styles of a specific varietal or type from many different regions, countries and producers--nothing like trying two or three dozen Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand, and then comparing your notes to another couple of dozen from France, Chile, the USA, Australia and so on.

It's unparalleled as an educational opportunity, which is why I attend three days of the festival tasting every year. For folks who marvel at (or are suspicious of) how I always seem to have an answer or an opinion about wine styles, regions or producers, this explains things--I've just done the research. I'm lucky enough to qualify as a trade member for two days in the week (from 2:30 to 5:00 pm, and no, unless you work in the industry you can't go) where I very studiously bring a camera, notebook and my best tasting discipline, looking for trends, changes in consumer behaviour and exciting ideas (to steal). I keep doing this, although it's a burden.

Okay, quiet down your guffaws. It really, truly is work: I spit everything, make notes, and have to fight through crowds of buyers and schmoozers who are asking the kind of questions I want to ask. And every year it comes at a very busy time at Winexpert (year-end. planning, employee reviews, etc). But it's something I wouldn't miss for the world: there simply is no other way to educate your palate as quickly (and as cheaply!) than a good wine festival.

I'm into my third decade of attending the Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival, and it just gets better, every single year. This year's theme is Chile, and I'm eager to see what's up and coming, as the country has moved way up from being a bulk supplier to a value-priced producer, to standing on it's own as a fine wine producer with enormous ongoing potential.

If you'd like to play along at home, get your Tweet on to @WinexpertTim, hashtagging at #VIPWF, or hook up to my face on Facebook (Tim Vandergrift) and I'll be shooting out updates from the festival floor, and pointing the way towards things I enjoy--or not, as the case may be. I'm expecting a jolly interesting afternoon, and some very educational tasting.

Oh, I did mention that I attended three days: the third is on Saturday night, when I take my wife, the Lady Dawn (yes, for reals) out in a stretch limo in her ballgown and we make a soiree of it. After all, there comes a time when a man wants to stop spitting, and what better time than when he has a pretty girl on his arm?

Yes, yes, I know: what has been seen can't be unseen and I owe some folks eyeball bleach to get that image out of their minds. But it's all in a good cause. Monday, February 29th is Pink Shirt Day, when you can take the opportunity to stand against bullying by showing your colours--in this case, pink. By wearing pink you'll show others that you're committed to a bully-free lifestyle.

Awareness of bullying has come a very long way since my school days when kids were advised to 'Stand up for yourself', and that, 'Bullies are cowards, they'll back down'. Hogwash, of course. Bullies are manipulative, hurtful sociopaths, and rather than 'back down', they come back from another direction, working to isolate their victims and torment them. The only way to deal with them is to shine a light on their behaviour and to confront it at every turn: evil thrives in darkness and together we can light up the corners where they hide, and standing together we can abnegate their anti-social acts and make safe and welcoming schools and workplaces.

Let the bullied know they're not alone, and that you'll stand beside them--and stand against bullying--by wearing a pink shirt tomorrow. In Canada, Pink Shirt Day has some good resources but wherever you live schools, Boys and Girls Clubs and community groups all have anti-bullying programs. Get involved and you can make a difference.

See you in the pink.

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.
--Steve Allen

Ah, but today it is neither dogs, nor the kind of smoke that comes from cigars that I wish to discuss. Today I'm smoking meat. To be precise, I'm making bacon (insert rejoinders here.)

Readers may recall such previous meaty efforts as my salami curing blog, and my pork-belly pleasures, as well as numerous anecdotes of me eating slabs of meat the size of Eastern European countries.

I'm definitely a carnivorously-oriented trencherman--don't get me wrong, I love my veggies, especially as I get older and look to eat a little more lightly. But for me there's nothing that speaks to the pleasures of the table as much as meat does, and as anyone who eats knows, bacon is to meat what pure, refreshing water is to a random pile of hydrogen and oxygen atoms--the synergy of meat, cure and smoke is the thing that brings together the universe into a pure, loving quantum of harmony and porky goodness. Amen.

Ahem.

With these feelings in mind, my wife bought me a present for my birthday this past January, an electric smoker.

We were away for part of January, and in between the weather in the rainforest has been execrable--lashing rain, winter storms tossing sediment and driftwood high on the beaches and generally just too poopy for anything to be accomplished outdoors. But with an eye to improving conditions, I started my smoking project last week, with the obtainment and preparation of pork bellies. 

You can smoke anything: in a previous life as a professional cook, I used to make chili by smoking onions and peppers before I used them, and I've eaten smoked tofu (rubbery like tofu! Smoky like smoke!) and had enough smoked salmon in my life to fill a driftnet. But I decided to start with bacon. I already love and work with pork belly on a regular basis, marinating it for a low-slow roast and succulent tenderness. By switching up the marinades you can do some pretty cool things with it, from making Hoisin pork belly (brilliant in stir-fry) or orange-juniper-clove pork belly (great with a little orange glaze as a slider filling).

Accordingly, I toddled off to my usual Chinese supermarket and made off with some lovely pork belly.

I proceeded with a curing rub. There are a lot of different options out there, but for bacon the cure is the first step in altering the texture of the meat (by drawing water out of the cells, making the meat softer, and drawing amino acids out of those same cells to the surface where they contribute flavour and aroma. The cure also flavours the meat. This time I chose to do a simple rub of 50/50 salt and brown sugar, with a dab of maple syrup thrown in. Normally one makes a brine which includes water, but I was cross-disciplining here . . . more on this later. I popped the bellies into a vacuum sealed bag and left them in the refrigerator for a week.

The next step was to open up my new toybox and put the smoker together.

Surprisingly simple--an aluminium box with some racks, a drip tray and a pan that sits on a small heating element--it's still elegant and well-made.

Once I had everything in place I grabbed my now-marinated pork bellies from the fridge.

They had shrunk by about 25%--not surprising, given that they'd given off a couple of cups of liquid. They also had a pleasantly elastic, smooth feel to them, a consequence of the muscle fibres fitting closer together in the absence of all that water.

I then assembled the smoker (thoughtfully covering the drip pan in aluminium foil first) and dropped the rack in.

Then it was time to put the top on, plug it in, and load the pan with chips. This go-round I chose to use Alder wood chips. They have a relatively neutral flavour (unlike Mesquite, Hickory or Apple, all of which I have as well) and I wanted to control for as many variables as possible on my first go-round.

 I plugged it in, filled the little pan with chips . . .

 . . . and popped it into the cute little doggie-door in the front.

After about ten minutes, it started to smoke. Interestingly, it didn't billow out big smoky gusts--just kind of dribbled a little bit as time passed.

After about an hour I popped the top off and hauled the freshly smoked bellies out. They smelled absolutely fantastic. and on the outside looked almost as though they had cooked. But they weren't ready to eat!

I popped one slab of my bacon (because that's what it had become) into the convection oven and cooked it at 260F for two hours. When it came out, it looked like this:

Soft, tender and falling apart under the fork, it was gorgeous. I also sliced up one of the raw slabs and Sunday morning I cooked some up with eggs and fried potatoes in the rendered bacon fat (oh, hush: bacon grease is good for you. Everyone should drink a cup every day).

 So how was it? In a word, salty. While the texture was excellent, the level of salt that my rub induced was right at the edge of pleasurable eating. No matter: it's fine if you're eating a couple of slices of bacon, and it's utterly perfect in a bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich. The slab I cooked whole is brilliant for flavouring sauteed greens and Chinese stir-fries and cubed it makes great lardons or bacon-bits. I'm going to grind up one of the remaining uncooked slabs along with some pork shoulder and make sausage out of it, which should give excellent flavour.

Now to find other things to smoke!

Back from vacation, I've hit the ground running. I've seen a lot of good ideas for blogs whizzing by me in the last week, but unlike Mick Jagger, time is not on my side, no it's not. I owe articles to various editors (hi Betsy! I promise I'm working on it . . .), instruction sets (hi Sandra!) various marketing pieces (hi Lynne!), personnel reviews (hi Boss!), and I've got a pile of travel to book.

How much travel? If I was a suitcase, I'd look like this:

Only I'd make a lousy suitcase, as I'd be over the weight limit, wouldn't fit in the overhead bin, and my zipper is usually stuck. I'm not complaining about travel, mind you: it keeps things interesting. But my schedule has not yet failed to get more complex and busy every year since I started in the wine industry. Check it out:

• March: Chengdu, China (trade show)
• April: Kelowna, BC (industry conference)
• May: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (company conference), Kent, Ohio (distributor conference), back to BC for the weekend for another company conference and then . . .
• June: Ithaca New York (Winemaker Magazine conference) and back to Niagara-on-the-Lake for another industry conference

During this time I have to finish scripting a new educational program for our retail partners, and shoot the video segments and get it organised into a web-seminar for use by third quarter of the year--more work than you might think, that sort of thing. I've also got to get off my duff and spend some time with our US West retail partners. We've recently changed the way we distribute in that region (much for the better, I think) and it's time I catch up with old friends and find out what's going on out there.

And it's time to start picking dates for my Limited Edition tour coming up in the fall--no, it's not too soon. If I don't block the time out this month, everyone's schedule gets crazily busy--well, busier than usual, anyway.

In between I have my regular job, and a couple of very cool things are going to be happening with that. I'll share as soon as I can (which is to say, after the company conferences are done in May) but I'm pretty stoked about getting more information about winemaking into the consumer's hands, and getting anyone who is interested to contribute to the sum of home winemaking knowledge.

Sound interesting? Stick around and I'll tell all.

A quick note to all you romantics out there: I'm writing this on the 14th of February, Valentine's day. I like almost all religious holidays, and I'm pretty sure this one is a modern salute to the ancient rituals of Lupercalia. Of course, the Romans were a little more, ahem, direct in their observations, as they didn't have chocolate and cards--it was a straight-up fertility festival, with all that entails. Suits me.

But if you like your Valentine's day mooshy, I do hope you have love in your life, and in your heart, and that you can share it with those around you. I made my wife dinner on Sunday, and it turned out pretty well indeed, with a dandy bottle of Argentinian Malbec and some scrumptious blue cheese Yorkshire popovers.

More Valentines observations here and here and here.

If anyone needs me, I'll be third bum from the left, on a beach in Mexico. If anyone sees my cat driving my car or using my credit cards, please call his probation officer.

See you in a few days.

I'm here today to do something I very rarely do: talk about wine kits. What spurred me on was an article I read about Lego.

For those not used to my lumber-room of a mind and the way it generates associations (I'm not convinced I'm really conscious all of the time--I just have a big correlation-engine running in my head that makes it look like I'm thinking), sometimes it throws off connections that are at first blush, weird. Sure Lego and consumer winemaking are two things that encourage creativity, personal connectedness to a project, and the satisfaction of seeing something you made with your hands turn into a finished product. But that could be said of many lifestyle activities.

Nope, what made me think of wine kits is the fact that I've always wound up with extra Lego pieces from every box I bought. When I was a little shaver, this never bothered me--so what if I had some left over bits? It's not like a puzzle, or a caburettor, where missed pieces leave you high and dry.

But as an adult, I started to wonder why I always had leftover pieces. I'm not that much of a doofus . . . am I? It turns out that yes, I'm a doofus, but the extra pieces are just that: extra. Lego understands that a certain number of bits get lost from their sets over time, and they toss in a few extra pieces to every box, usually the mission-critical ones that set the theme of whatever you're constructing. I don't know about you, but I think this is awesome--they actually want you to succeed at your Lego play, and they pre-emptively reduce frustration by staunching a potential weak point before the end user even notices.

And here's the part where I talk about wine kits. For those who aren't currently using them (shame on you, do you want me to starve?) all kit wine is made partially with concentrated grape juice.

There's a bit of confusion around why we use concentrate--is it because it's cheaper than unconcentrated juice? (Not as such--there's cheap juice and expensive concentrate, and an unbreakable linear relationship between cost and quality in each). Is it because it occupies less space than unconcentrated juice and is thus easier to ship? (Yes, partly, but see below for the biggest reason.)

The big answer is that concentrate acts as a preservative. If you come from a line of home canners, or are just an enthusiast of preserves and jams, you'll understand why. Jam is made from fruits with moderate to high acid levels, with sugar added to it. Acid means the pH is low, preventing the growth of spoilage organisms and moulds while slowing browning, and sugar is actually toxic to most cellular life--the osmotic pressure of high sugar solutions bursts the cell walls of spoilage bugs, killing them. When you concentrate fresh juice, you increase the acidity, lower the pH and raise the sugar level--voila, you've preserved the grape juice without ruining the quality or using fierce chemical preservatives.

Ahem. This all means that when you go to make the kit, you're obligated to add water to it, making the volume up to the original amount, usually 23 litres (5 Imperial gallons, 6.1 US gallons. If you've ever wondered why kits are all 23 litres, it's because that was the common size of glass water bottles in the empire when home winemaking got started here, and we've stuck to it partly because of momentum, and partly because that's the smallest amount of wine I can visualise wanting to make.)

Where it becomes an issue is at racking, fining and stabilising. After the kit is transferred out of the first fermenting vessel into the carboy it will be shy just under a litre of volume due to the amount of yeast cells, colloidal material and (if any) oak products that are left behind as part of the process. No problem, until fining and stabilising day: after you've added the stabilisers (to keep the wine from oxidising or spoiling during ageing--the same things are used in commercial wine) and the fining agent (used to clear the wine, again, same thing in commercial wine), you're instructed

'Top up the carboy to within 2 inches of the bottom of the bung. Use cool water. Topping up helps prevent spoilage.'

And that's what throws some folks. The concern is that the wine is going fine--won't adding water at this point dilute it? Wouldn't it be better to use wine to top it up, to prevent a loss of flavour and aroma? We continue to get calls on this, year in and year out at Winexpert.

The answer is yes, the water will dilute the wine--to exactly the level we want it to be diluted! You see, all Winexpert kits are made to 4% over strength, with extra Brix levels and Total Dissolved Solid material calculated to produce a kit that will work out perfectly at 23 litres + 4%, which is 0.92 litres, or about a US quart. 

It's like Lego. We want to make sure you make great wine, so we throw in that extra so you don't have to go out and buy a bottle to top up.

Now, a couple of things. First, you can't make the wine to 23.92 litres on day one and go from there. You won't have enough room in the carboy for the additions and stirring necessary at the Fining and Stablising step. Second, if you need to add much more than 920 ml of topping water you've a) got an off-size carboy, or b) not added enough water on day one, or c) been too fussy at racking to the carboy.

C) is the kicker: we really want you to rack over everything except the lumps from the primary fermenter--essentially, if it'll go down the racking tube without fighting back, carry it over.

So this is what kept me awake until three in the morning, thinking about Lego and winemaking. If I'd played with Lincoln Logs as a kid, I have no idea what kind of a career I'd be in right now.

Some days it seems like I'm picking on Alder Yarrow. Today, however, Alder is just the messenger. Unlike previous blogs, wherein I was  uncharitable about something Alder said, this time I'm grateful to him for pointing out someone else who has earned my pique: Talia Baiocchi, and through her I'm climbing back on my favorite hobbyhorse, You Can't Trust Wine Writers (Including Me).

It all started like this: Alder posted a link to an article about Vinturi wine aerators on Bon Appetit. In it the author, Ms. Baiocchi, who was guesting at Bon Appetit (she writes for eater.com) reviewed the Vinturi, an interesting gizmo designed to aerate wine quickly, mimicking the effects of decanting.

She got the PR stuff about the Vinturi right:

The Vinturi wine aerator is a 6"-tall device that looks a little like a funnel and is meant to speed up the process of decanting. To use it, pour wine through the Vinturi into your glass, and watch the device take advantage of Bernoulli's Principal, which states that as the speed of a fluid increases, the pressure within it decreases.  According to a Vinturi rep, this "accelerates the natural blending of air and wine, revealing its true essence and character." In other words, the Vinturi claims that it can do in a matter of seconds what a decanter does in an hour or more

Fair enough, that's the idea behind it. And before we go any further, full disclosure: my company has distributed Vinturi aerators as a promo item in the past, but we've never sold them and once we moved the last of them we've had no commercial contact with the company since. I don't work for them, and I don't own one myself (the lab took it). But I do have lab data on their effects on wine, so I was terribly interested to see what conclusions Ms. Baiocchi drew from her tests. She set up a trial involving three New York sommeliers.

We sat down with New York sommeliers Michael Madrigale (Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud), Francesco Grosso (Marea), and Jordan Salcito (Crown) for a blind tasting to find out if a Vinturi really delivers a better glass of wine.

So far so good: people who sell wine for a living, and a blind tasting. I'm all for it.

Then, the wheels all fall off this experiment. Not just off, but all at once in a way that not only wrecks the car, but takes out an innocent family of fluffy little ducks on the way to a careening pile of wreckage that leaks sloppy methodology and facile journalism all over an otherwise lovely landscape.

A total of four wines of varying styles were tasted blind in four flights; each flight consisted of a glass that had been poured directly into the glass and one that had been poured into the glass through the Vinturi aerator. Each sommelier was asked to choose the wine they preferred and discuss the differences between the two glasses in each flight.

Wait, what? Straight up one-on-ones? That's not how you do blind tasting to produce data! That's how you share wine in a bar and produce anecdotes, especially in a chummy group of three New York sommeliers (it's a small world: they all know each other, at least by reputation).

The first problem is the sample size. Four wines, three people. It's a statistically useless exercise right off the bat, and nobody who conducts any kind of scientific study would turn in a sample study that tiny.

Second, you don't do one-on-ones. You do triangle tests. Instead of two samples, each different, you serve three samples, two the same, one different. And you don't just do that once: you do it multiple times, switching it up to eliminate chance.

Third, nobody talks about the wine until after the scores are tallied--that way subtle cues can't be passed along by a dominant member of the tasting group to the others.

Here's where the sweet, fluffy little ducks get it:

Before we get into the tasting, a side note: As the first drops of wine met the Vinturi, it let out a noise that toes a thin line between sloshing and muffled screaming. The pourer was so surprised that she missed the glass, and every single person in the room stopped to stare, then laugh. In other words, the thing sounds ridiculous, like a dying cat. 

Not only is this not a blind trial, it's a million miles from one. Three seconds with Wikipedia and you get this:

Double-blind describes an especially stringent way of conducting an experiment, usually on human subjects, in an attempt to eliminate subjective bias on the part of both experimental subjects and the experimenters. In most cases, double-blind experiments are held to achieve a higher standard of scientific rigor.

In a double-blind experiment, neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group. Only after all the data have been recorded (and in some cases, analysed) do the researchers learn which individuals are which. Performing an experiment in double-blind fashion is a way to lessen the influence of the prejudices and unintentional physical cues on the results (the placebo effect, observer bias, and experimenter's bias). Random assignment of the subject to the experimental or control group is a critical part of double-blind research design. The key that identifies the subjects and which group they belonged to is kept by a third party and not given to the researchers until the study is over.

Double-blind methods can be applied to any experimental situation where there is the possibility that the results will be affected by conscious or unconscious bias on the part of the experimenter.

In a true blind tasting, the person pouring the wine and the person serving it are not the same. The samples are numerically coded so that there can be no transfer of bias from the server to the person doing the evaluating. No matter how starchy someone is, they would still convey subtle non-verbal cues as to which wine sounded 'like a dying cat'.

The tasting notes reflect terrible bias. They aren't presented from the individual tasters, but are rather a group consensus formed after the tasting: '. . . the group noticed that the wine seemed a bit oxidized and muddy'. Again with the anecdotes, not with data.

I don't know Ms. Baiocchi, and she certainly seems to be enthusiastic about wine. That's all well and lovely, and I can hardly criticise anyone for writing about their wine experiences. But if she's going to give advice on consumer products based on supposedly scientific methodology (ie, taste trials), she needs to exercise more experimental rigour.

And, she could do a bit more research: Nathan Myhrvold, genuine big-brain turned food researcher, wrote a short piece for Business Week on Hyperdecanting. Myhrvold is an interesting cat. After retiring as Microsoft's chief strategist and technology officer, he got interested in food and cooking--interested as only an intellectually curious, hyper-intelligent billionaire used to commanding teams of researchers with gigantic budgets can be. While it's not relevant to the article he wrote, I can't resist pasting in a picture of his research kitchen:

What, your kitchen doesn't have an oxy-acetylene rig and an autoclave?

Ahem.

His article posits a much more vigorous approach to introducing oxygen into wine: by placing it in a blender on high.

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender. I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving. I call it "hyperdecanting."

Whoa. If the Vinturi is supposed to speed things up, frappé-aerating is going to do everything it does and more. Is Myrhvold confident of the technique?

Although torturing an expensive wine in this way may cause sensitive oenophiles to avert their eyes, it almost invariably improves red wines—particularly younger ones, but even a 1982 Château Margaux.

But wait! If I'm saying we shouldn't trust wine writers, and in the past I've railed against the '. . . logical fallacy, argumentum ad verecundiam, argument to respect. Because most of us trust people with credentials and acknowledged expertise, we tend to roll up our brains . . . ' If I'm to be consistent, I can't just assert that you should believe Myrhvold, because that would be intellectually dishonest.

But that's okay. He doesn't think you should believe him either--at least not without properly rigorous scientific evidence.

Don’t just take my word for it, try it yourself.

But set up a proper blind taste test to avoid subconscious bias among the tasters. That’s a bigger problem than you might imagine. Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90  percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

To avoid bias, use a "triangle test," which is a scientifically rigorous way to test for a perceptible difference between wine prepared two different ways. Get as many judges as you can—10 is the minimum to get good statistics. Give each judge three identical glasses, and label the glasses X, Y, and Z.

Hyperdecant half a bottle of wine and save the other half of the bottle to use for comparison. Out of view of the judges, pour an ounce or so of wine into each glass. The undecanted wine should go into two of the glasses, the hyperdecanted wine into the third, or vice versa. Vary the order of presentation among the judges so that not all are tasting the hyperdecanted wine first or last. Record which wine goes into which glass, and have the judges guess which two of their wines are the same. You’ll probably find that hyperdecanting does clearly change the flavor of the wine. To determine with scientific rigor whether your tasters prefer the hyperdecanted wine requires a more complex trial called a "paired preference" test, or "square" test. But a blind side-by-side comparison works passably well, too, and requires no math.

Dang, how about that. Somebody writing about wine who wants to share interesting observations, and then have you check them with a properly conducted rigorous trial.

Again, I'm not angry at Ms. Baiocchi. Nobody who earns a living writing has enough time to make perfect articles every single time, and I'm not comparing my work to hers--heaven forfend, if I had to earn my living exclusively through wine writing I'd rapidly be living in a cardboard box, drinking from a paper bag. But if there's one thing we owe our readers, it's an honest attempt at rigorous thinking.

And don't trust us.

Happy New Year to all of you, my friends. May this coming year bring peace, happiness and contentment for you and all those you love.

It's traditional to make resolutions on New Year's, but I really only have one: I never, ever want to have another year like 2011 on my dance card. I don't want to be a gloomy Gus on a festive night, but a very boring and uneventful 2012 would be just what the doctor ordered (literally).

For all of you who enjoy reading my stuff (get a life!) I do have one resolution: to catch up on some important blogging that has slipped by me while I was distracted. In the meantime, enjoy yourself and keep those you love close to you--and if you're looking, I hope you may find someone to love as well.

Cheers!

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Sol Invictus, Jul, Hanukkah or some other mid-winter seasonal festival, this is the time of year to reflect on the balance of the seasons and the turning of fall to winter, symbolic of death, rebirth, change and hope.

It's been exactly one month since I posted a blog entry. To people who've been waiting, I very much apologise. My personal life has unfortunately taken up much of my attention, and it's lead me to neglect my updates here. For all my friends who've been waiting to see pictures of the Limited Edition season, I'll get those up right quick, and for those looking for my particular brand of snarky disdain for the opinions of other wine writers, I've got a backlog of dismissive sneeriness to let loose, as well as some observations about modern wine thinking. 

However, that's down the road a wee bit. Before I get back to blogging, I'd like to wish all of you reading this the best of the season: no matter who you are or how you identify your beliefs, there's rarely a time of year when it's more welcome to be friendly, open of heart and free with good cheer and fellowship. May you find good in those around you, and take comfort in your families and your friends, and share the joys of your season with others.

Tim

Today we pause to honour the heroes who answered the call for their country. Canada has a proud legacy of valour in war and service in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

To all of our honoured dead, and those still with us, and those currently serving, I salute you, and thank you. Ave atque vale.

I’m not a smoker. To be sure, at one point in my life I tried really hard to become one, in an effort to emulate my father. Not only did he look like Johnny Cash (The Coolest Man Who Ever Lived) but also when he pulled a smoke out of his pack of Navy Cuts (the ones with the pretty girl in the Glengarry cap on the package) he would smoke like a cross between James Dean and a burning forest, with his internal landscape rearranged to permit the ingress of at least a dozen cubic feet of smoke every time he took a drag.

He also killed time in front of the TV rolling his own, a fascinating process that involved a machine the size of a paperback book with a tobacco loading slot and a lever, that when yanked carefully both compressed the shreds of demon weed into a tube and injected it into a waiting filter-tube. I mean, how cool is that to a gadget obsessed little shaver?

Alas, despite my misguided efforts to emulate my favourite authority figure, it was not to be. Childhood asthma, nicotine intolerance and general wimpiness prevented me from getting much farther than two puffs into a package of smokes before I had to lie down or throw up, most usually both. Plus, it made my mouth taste like a gas station floor (you can’t really call yourself a connoisseur of taste until you know that one by heart).

As an adult I’ve managed to develop a taste for a pipe and the extremely occasional cigar. Of course, inhaling pipes and cigars is optional (unless you’re a maniac) and it’s mainly a minor affectation I indulge on sea voyages, hikes and the rare occasion I’m enjoying a solitary brandy looking out over the ocean.

But I talk about tobacco fairly frequently. This odd turn of events comes from both written and verbal descriptions of red wine. Certain grapes, mostly those grown in warm (but not hot) climates develop a lovely floral nuance in the finish that wine nerds describe as ‘tobacco’. Usually I tell people that it is closest to the aroma of pipe tobacco, which has usually done the job.

But if you’re of a certain age (old, like me) you’ll have noticed that there are far fewer pipe smokers today than there were twenty or thirty years ago, at least here in North America. My cousin Dick and most of the weird uncles have given it up (or, very sadly, passed on to the big ashtray in the sky) and there’s a distinct lack of tweedy British types on our shores today. The fashion to use tobacco in any form seems to be slipping from our society.

Not that I mind, on the whole. It wouldn’t do to mistake my nostalgia for approval of a filthy habit that stinks up everything it’s near and, when used correctly, kills the people who engage in it. Can you imagine if you were trying to get tobacco approved as a consumer product today, with the science we have now? “So your product contains hundreds of toxic compounds, causes permanent lung damage, degrades cardiac function, is a potent source of carcinogens and has as a main active ingredient a psychoactive chemical that affects cognition and brain chemistry in ways we don’t fully understand and is both lethally poisonous in even very small doses and one of the most fiendishly addictive compounds known to man? Is that right, Mr. Marlborough?” Hah, good luck with that.

I hit on another descriptive strategy to counteract this lack of Meerschaum-munchers, by telling people that the smell I was talking about was the aroma of Nicotania, the plant that produces tobacco leaves. I grow a bunch of it in my garden at home every year. Not only is it a very pretty plant, with long, elegant flowers and big, well-formed leaves, it also produces the most impressive perfume—not from the blossoms, but from the leaves themselves, where sticky goo collects and causes the smell to adhere to your hands and anything else it touches for hours. I’ve always assumed that this was the ‘tar’ mentioned on cigarette packs, but it’s probably just a vegetable polysaccharide of some kind—goo, for want of a better name.

As good as Nicotainia smells when you touch it, it smells better after the sun goes down. This is because it’s a Vespertine, and like another more famous Vespertine, Night-Blooming Jasmine, it makes most of its delicious smells after the sun goes down. That’s why it’s planted right under my bedroom window, so that late fall affords me the nicest air-freshener imaginable.

If you’ve got space for flowers, I’d recommend Nicotainia. It’s hardy, grows in a wide variety of climates, and I think it’s charmingly pretty—you don’t even have to smoke it to appreciate it--although every year I do save a couple of leaves, cure them, and roll up a cigarette.

Reminds me of why I never could get the hang of smoking.

As I review blog entries from the last four years (I've been babbling here for that that long? How is that even possible?) a couple of patterns emerge. First, as projects come and go, the number of blog entries I put out ebb and flow, and mostly seem to be in ebb these days. If my boss were trying to find out how much time I was putting in on my job, a pretty good gauge would be the number of blog entries in any given month—more work = less blog. I simultaneously feel guilty and irritated at this. Guilty because despite the haphazard quality of my blogging efforts, I've been startled by the number of people who tell me they actually read timswineblog.com. It's gratifying, and not a little weird. One of the things I've learned from the pro-bloggers conference is that content is king, and regular updates keep readers happy; thus my guilt at letting blogging slide so often and occasionally for so long.

Irritation comes in because I actually really enjoy blogging. I've never been one to keep a diary or a daily journal, despite many efforts over the years to try to do so. I start with the best of intentions, but at the end of only a week or ten days I go back and have a look at what I've written, and it all seems like random drivel, so I tear out pages and give up again.

I really admire people who can keep up a regular journal. I bought Michael Palin's autobiography this year (Palin is a British actor most famous for being part of Monty Python, and has also done several travelogue shows). He has kept a diary almost his entire life, summarising and writing down everything that happens to him every day. Not only has this allowed him to put his life into context, it's also given him excellent fodder for autobiographical books (the volume I bought is thick enough to stun an ox, and it only covers his Python years!)

For me the blog is a sort of journal both of what I've been doing over the last few months and years and what's been on my mind at the time. Admittedly, a lot of what's on my mind is nonsense, but at least I have a sense of what I've been seeing and doing, in a format I can't tear out and throw away, no matter how much I cringe when I read it again.

After the work-induced irregularity of my blogging, the second thing that comes up when I review entries is that, as regular as the changing of the seasons, I do the same sort of work-related activities, at the same times of the year: conferences, holidays, Limited Edition tastings, educational seminars, festivals et al, and each of them brings other activities and patterns with it. If this is October, I must be on an airplane.

And, indeed, I am on an airplane (an Embrair 175, Delta 5893 from MSP to YVR), coming back from Minnesota and Wisconsin. I was travelling with my indomitable companion, Brian Wright. Brian is the US sales rep for our distributor, LD Carlson, and a good guy to do the road warrior gig with.

For those who don't travel professionally, many people who spend a third or more of their time travelling for work often refer to themselves and each other as 'Road Warriors', not because they behave like bandits in a dystopian world, but because it takes a lot of discipline and focus to get on six airplanes in five days, stay in four different hotels and put on a thousand miles in a car without losing your luggage, too much sleep, your personal effects or your sanity. It's a point of pride that we approach travel with a take-charge attitude, adapt to flight cancellations and schedule changes with aplomb, and work fiendishly to cram productivity into every hour.

Of course we all slip. This trip I'm terrifically short on sleep because the most economical way to do an in-week business trip is to fly in the day of your first appointment. In order to go east and get anything done before nightfall it's necessary to catch the earliest flight possible—not only because of the long flight times (typically 4+ hours to get from my home on the West Coast to the centre of the continent) but also because of the time change. Tacking on a magical three hours of time zones to a 4 hour flight means you have to take off at 7 am to make a 4 pm business meeting, and to make the day worth it you need to schedule evening stuff as well.

With US travel you really do need to get to the airport plenty early. Since I'm a top-tier frequent flyer, I can usually by-pass regular check-in, and get a jump on security clearance, but Homeworld Security is a whole 'nother bag of onions, especially if you're in the Vancouver airport when a cruise-ship lets off four or five thousand people to fly home. So it's up at 4 am to avoid the awful, horrible, not-very-good traffic that forms a permanent clog on every major artery in Vancouver 20 hours a day, 365 days a year, hit the airport, participate in security theatre and make it to the plane.

By the time the business day is done, it's usually 10 o'clock or so (most of my consumer events start at 7-ish, I talk for 45 minutes to an hour, hang out to pour wine and answer questions, do a wrap-up with our retail partner and realise that I haven't eaten since an airport sandwich at 2 pm. After a quick bite, almost always in a bar since they're the only places that have kitchens open late, it's back to the hotel to try to catch up on some emails, voicemails and urgent projects, before collapsing like a heap of dishevelled laundry into the bed.

And then it's up at 6:30 to make a breakfast meeting and get the day going. The only way to sustain this is to sacrifice sleep and fight back the tide of fatigue with lashings of coffee. Excess coffee consumption carries its own price. As Terry Pratchett once observed, it doesn't really make you more alert of itself: it merely borrows some alertness from your future self, alertness that will have to be paid back, one way or another, down the line.

Witness to this zero-sum energy game is my ability to sleep on airplanes. When I was younger, and didn't travel as much, I simply could not sleep in a moving vehicle, even on a 20 hour flight to New Zealand or Japan. Now, with my circadian rhythm washed away by the battering of time-zone switching and odd hours, I can barely stay awake on planes. It's as though the seat-belt clasp is some kind of tranquiliser talisman: it clicks home and my head tilts back, mouth open and a ribbon of drool down my neck.

I usually make a supreme effort to wake up after only a short nap, because airplanes are a brilliant place to get some writing done. There's normally no internet, I don't watch most popular TV or movies, so that doesn't distract me, and I'm almost always travelling alone, so I don't have anyone to talk to. I just did a quick word-count on this blog entry, and I've written over 1200 words in less than an hour. To be sure it's self-referential inconsequentialities, but all words are grist for the mill, I say, so I always try to make the most of airplane time.

Another way this trip has me slipping up is control of personal items. Not only did I leave a perfectly good jacket in the Minneapolis airport on Tuesday, I can't find my pocket camera. I'm hoping I tucked it into my suitcase, but I have a sinking feeling that I saw it sitting in the hall where we had our event last night. If I did, I can get someone to check for me, but the lost and found at MSP didn't have my jacket. Even Brian had some issues this trip, leaving his headphones in one of the hotels we stayed at.

It feels like a defeat to my inner road warrior. In the last ten years I've lost four pairs of sunglasses, two sets of headphones, an iPod (I'm pretty sure a Vancouver airport pickpocket got that one), phone chargers and cases, and dozens of miscellaneous items. Honestly, if someone made a decent purse for men, I'd seriously have a look at carrying one just as a catch-all for my junk.

There's also a series of weird effects stemming from frequent travel. The first is a cognitive mess, a combination of déjà vu and jamais vu. After you've visited your 80th or 90th city everything looks familiar—even when you're visiting a place you've never been before. It's a side-effect of the human brain's penchant for pattern recognition. Many airports and downtown city cores have very similar features, and as your mind seeks familiarity it can generate a powerful sense of having been there before.

Jamais vu is even odder. Because your brain gets clogged with the places you've been, and you're exposed to so many versions of the same streets and buildings, suddenly the familiar can seem strange and new, or dislocated in time and space. Combine the two and suddenly you feel as though you're simultaneously trembling on the verge of recognition and utter unfamiliarity.

Hah! What was that I said about forcing myself to stay awake? My neck is sore and there's a puddle of drool in the hollow of my collarbone, and there's only an hour left in the flight. It seems I fell asleep as I wrote that last paragraph. When I asked the flight attendant if I had been snoring, she said no, but the lady behind me let out a rather unladylike snort, so I know that I was probably sounding like a bandsaw trying to cut horseshoes. C'est la guerre.

Another thing that comes from visiting so many cities and places is the ability to watch a travel show or a news item about a specific place and announce, 'I've been there!' This would be a lot more impressive, I guess if I was announcing it about the pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower, but usually it's Barrie or Schenectady—lovely places of themselves, to be sure.

But after all of that, I still love travelling for my job. I get to see new people, meet folks who I've talked to for years, get to know them and their families see what they do with our wines and check out the communities they live in. It's excellent compensation for the hours and the road-bruises.

And I wouldn't change it for the world.

Updated

I was home for the weekend and now it's off to events in British Columbia. When (or perhaps if . . . gulp!) I recover my camera I'll post some pictures of my events in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I've enjoyed seeing my wife and petting my cat, who gave his usual response to my return: 'Oh, look: it's that man who comes here to do his laundry.'

The only thing better than travelling must be coming home.

It's that time of year again! After keeping it under my hat for almost a full year, I can now fully reveal the varieties of the Limited edition. Are you ready?

All right: It's going to be 3 reds and 2 whites.

Ha ha ha ha, that never gets old! Tune in in just over 90 minutes to get the real scoop, when Winexpert does a full announcement of the varieties, styles, regions, flavours and foods. See you then!