Disclaimer: I was 21 years old at the time of drinking anything
This summer, our lab started with a promise to host a series of wine nights.
Katerina and Lucas (Gang Lab adjacent) had both gotten sommelier training in the past year through Columbia’s bartending class. Our office has a culture of appreciating alcohol in general, through the nerdy lens of people eccentric enough to conduct and enjoy research.
And though I’d missed the first one, French wine night was coming up! Katerina tasked us each with finding a French wine, and preparing a short oral presentation on the flavor profile and the history of the region.
I was determined to find a great wine and learn all about what makes alcohol “good” or “bad.” It was about time I stopped embarrassing myself by settling for Svedka shots.
Everything about the Panicaut Rouge!
I walked into International Wine and Spirits across the street from my dorm, with nothing but my ID and a phone opened to r/Wine.
After deliberating for 25 minutes, I settled on this one—it was a red wine from the Plan de Dieu region in the Cotes du Rhone Villages AOC, from a village denoted especially for its exceptional quality (or so goes the title).
It should have a moderately rich, dark fruit flavor (think: cherry, blackberry) with a slightly savory and spiced finish.
Grape composition
The wine was composed of
- 60% grenache
- well suited to hot, sunny, dry conditions
- adaptable and vigorous
- ripe fruit flavor, full body, high alcohol content
- notes of herbs and spice
- 40% mourvedre
- also thrives in warm sunny conditions
- produces deeply colored, full-bodied, tannic wines
Growing conditions
I looked into the growing conditions of the grapes which went into this wine:
- The vines were grown on soil of limestone origin, covered with alluvium
- Grown in a warm mediterranean climate, with a long, hot, and dry summer
- There is a violent mistral north wind, but the grapes are quite resilient! So the wind ultimately helps prevent the vineyards from becoming damp or humid, so we don’t have to treat the vines as much for fungal disease.
And ideally, all of the backstory should lead into this wine tasting pretty good.
Wine night
At wine night itself, I have a pretty good time.
We’re tasting like 12 different wines, red and white all in succession, so I’m noticing all the subtle differences I’d never realized were present before.
White wines
The white wines on average were more dry / acidic. There were some interesting notes!
- Some which tasted oily / buttery
- others like apple
- and even one that had notes of lychee (this one was great)
Red wines
The red wines had more body, on the whole. They were richer and a lot of people preferred them (on average) to the whites. They definitely had a juicier, berry flavor profile to them.
BTW: Among the reds from that night, mine was the favorite. 😎
“Elevated alcoholism”
It was interesting because alcohol often brings this connotation of unseemliness, yet the French wine night felt like a much more “elevated” way of going about getting wasted.
Our deeper analyses of the wine’s flavor complexity and history was a fun way of bridging our nerdiness with our desire to come together, with the simpler pleasures of alcohol—lowering our social inhibition, and helping us connect with each other.
Jazz clubs and lizard brains
I was working at the office late into one night, when Elad asks if Raghav and I would like to join him in coming to a jazz club with him. Neither of us have gone to a jazz club before, so we enthusiastically agree to the idea on the spot!
So us and a couple of others buy tickets to see “Darcy’s Secret Society” at Dizzy’s Club for that Friday.
Cheese boards, appreciating flavors
The experience on the whole is nice! We get a cheese board and it was quite tasty. I’d never appreciated the pairing of sour/salty and sweet flavors in the same way that the soft cheese and honey brought. And the textural contrast of the toasted baguette and the butter-like cheese spread on top gave it a pleasant mouthfeel.
Part of “learning more about the world” for me, entails being able to enjoy the complexity in food, in other daily aspects of my life, beyond my research. But it’s astounding how easy it is to not think with these things, whereas with research thinking is a prerequisite. So it’s cool to come back into tasting food and alcohol with the kind of structured, problem solving, systems-based approach which research usually entails.
Sophisticated lizard instincts
One of the songs at this concert stood out to me. It was titled “Lizard Brain,” and it expressed different base desires—for food, power, sex—with a complex cacophany of dissonant chords and layered textures. At some point, they were just playing moaning sounds with their saxophones. It all came to a climactic crash and the piece ended with the audience stunned.
To me, it was moving to see that despite having all this complexity on top, of rich cheeses and delicious chord pairings, that we’re still beholden to these lizard instincts.
…have the potential to be taken too far
I’ve had my own tumultuous relationship with my desires. I used to struggle with binge-eating in the past, and in general find it difficult to moderate myself from indulging in too much of a good thing.
My dad used to drink a lot, drinking 5-6 beers a day. For many families, alcohol brings violence and abuse alongside itself.
And interplay with social media
In general, these desires are so deeply intertwined with sin—a problem which has taken many forms over the years. At a Gang lab group lunch, we matched up the seven deadly sins to different social media platforms:
- Pride = LinkedIn
- Greed = Amazon
- Wrath = Twitter
- Envy = Instagram
- Lust = OnlyFans
- Gluttony = Beli
- Sloth = TikTok
Though we were laughing as we made it, the comparison rings true when seeing how social media platforms legitimately fuel their own desire-driven capitalist ecosystems by preying on our insecurities and desires.
”Not taking it seriously”
I started using Beli recently, which is a social media platform for ranking different restaurants. It’s been honestly nice to have a centralized list of all the different restaurants I’ve been to in NYC, as a kind of food diary.
A friend of mine in the robotics club told me that he uses Beli as well, but that he doesn’t take it seriously.
Regardless, I think the answer I’m running into again is—I should find the balance between giving into these desires and overdoing it.