Posts by Bart Janssen
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And there is a very simple reason for that, it is poisonous. It causes your body damage. Therefore it is a trained taste, not innate.
I don't expect to change your mind Ben but this is not correct.
There is sweet FA evidence to show alcohol in small doses does humans harm. Before anyone panics I'm not saying getting drunk is good for you or anything of that nature. Simply that as far as I know (and I've read a bit) there are no studies that show moderate drinking does anyone any harm. Certainly not enough harm to create a selective pressure to create a genetic basis for disliking alcohol.
So your evolutionary argument is without basis Ben.
To be honest my guess is that humans have been using alcohol long enough to purify water to be able to make and equally valid (or invalid) evolutionary argument in favour of alcohol. It would go like this...
Way back when alcohol was first being used, water was frequently not safe to drink. Thus those humans that laced their water with alcohol (thus killing nasty bacteria, worms etc) were less likely to succumb to disease and more likely to breed. This might have created a selective advantage for those genetically disposed to prefer the taste of alcohol.
Of course the above is just waffle. Most evolutionary arguments are just waffle, they can be plausible but never provable. However thinking about selection pressure that might have operated can help sometime. However as I said there just is no evidence for a selection pressure against alcohol (in moderation).
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Graeme
Water is also a solvent. A very very common one.
yes but the full quote is...
The reason is because alcohol is a solvent. Many of the flavour compounds in wine dissolve in alcohol and not in water.
You do law, I'll do biology/chemistry :).
Seriously alcohol-free wine is possible and does sell, although it tends to be expensive. The problem is that ethanol can do things that water can't. And in the end, as hard as people have tried they cannot keep all the flavours in wine when they remove the ethanol AND you cannot taste the flavours in ethanol free wine the way you can when ethanol is present.
Ben my palate is different from yours. I like the flavours in Ata Rangi Pinot Noir. And I've always liked the flavours in wine. I have learned to appreciated them more with practice and learned to identify why I like some more than others.
I learned the pleasure of being tiddly/drunk with spirits. And I drank those even when I found some of them sickly sweet, I tend not to anymore. I can get drunk on wine but that is not why I drink wine and never has been.
I don't like beer, because I don't like the flavour of hops. Does that mean nobody else likes beer?
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argh
tates => tastes
expect => exceptdamn beta software :P
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Ben
I'm yet to see the shelves lined with no-alcohol wine and millions of connoisseurs supping away going on about the lovely bouquet and which bloody province of France it comes from.
The reason is because alcohol is a solvent. Many of the flavour compounds in wine dissolve in alcohol and not in water. Also because alcohol has a higher vapour pressure than water the flavour compounds dissolved in alcohol are carried by the alcohol vapour to the place in your nose where you detect those compounds.
So if you remove alcohol from wine you remove many of the flavour compounds and you remove your ability to smell and taste those compounds. Note most of the tates of wine are smells carried by vapour from your mouth up to the back of your nose where you detect them. You in fact taste most things in your nose not on your tongue, expect for the 5 tastes the tongue does detect.
TLDR Take alcohol from the wine it does not taste as good. The reason the shelves have an absence of alcohol free wine is because it tastes like crap.
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Robyn
The sense of taste develops as we get older. Where we previously were revolted by olives, as adults we happily eat them. Oh, and coffee - that's a big one.
Actually it's the reverse. Children have a much better (more sensitive) palate than adults. They can detect lower concentrations of compounds.
The reason children hate broccoli etc is because they have a much stronger ability to detect the bitter compounds than us adults. To them it really does taste yucky. It's you the adult who can't tell how yucky it tastes :). As a general rule if a child tells you it tastes bad it's because their sense of taste and smell is better than yours.
It's a bit more complicated than that because there does also appear to be a particular heightening of the ability to detect bitter compounds in children. That makes evolutionary sense since bitter compounds are often toxic and often more toxic to children than adults.
But mostly the reason you like coffee is because you got older and lost the ability to taste all the bad flavours. See there are advantages to getting older.
However, there is another factor in play as well. Children do not have the language to describe the different flavours and scents they detect and as a result tend to lump things together. For example fruit are all sweet, until they learn the language to describe the differences between individual fruit.
Language plays a huge role in our perceptions. If you don't have the words to describe the difference you tend to stop noticing the difference. It's easiest to see when learning to taste wine, as you learn more words to describe different flavours, those flavours become easier to distinguish.
So young drinkers are doing two things when they avoid complex dry wines. First they are tasting the unpleasant flavours that we can no longer taste and second they are failing to distinguish the complexity that exist in the wine because they don't have the language yet.
Capturing that in legislation might be tricky :).
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one of capitalism's great strength is it isn't a philosophy, or at least it didn't start as one.
um kinda. You'd have to admit that Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" is a philosophy of capitalism as much as it is anything.
I think all of the forms of society being discussed have evolved from their origins. And I can't see capitalism as anything other than a philosophy now and in some cultures it is even elevated to the status of a religion.
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I think a case can be made that climate change is a direct result of capitalism. Capitalism is beleaguered by short-term, narrow thinking that results in some very bad outcomes.
I think you'd have a very hard time making that case. The USSR was one of the worst polluters on the planet. China is currently one of the worst.
Industrialization has led to climate change. But that has occurred in every political environment.
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Regarding communism vs capitalism vs anarchism and wine.
It seems to me that none of the above systems is either perfect or perfectly flawed.
Instead there are some things capitalism does very well. An example is the leading edge medical care available to the rich in the US which is a direct result of profit driven capitalist big pharma. Equally, those same companies can't be arsed developing drugs for diseases of the poor and in the US health care for those without money is appalling.
Similarly Communism could get trains running on time and did a good job in some places of lifting the poverty and base health level. But failed in the end to provide enough innovation and cool toys eg washing machines.
I don't really know of any examples of anarchism, unless you want to look at Africa where it seems as though anarchism has little to recommend itself.
The point is no extreme political philosophy works very well at all.
Instead societies that balance capitalism and socialism and anarchism seem to do the best. There are times when it is best to have the government run something. There are times when the free market does the best job. There are times when an absence of rules/laws works really well and times when regulation is needed.
What seems to be even more confusing is that things that work well in some cultures don't work at all in others. The European approach to alcohol does not work in New Zealand. It's a cultural difference. But even worse than that, within New Zealand we have markedly diverse cultures. What works in Kingsland doesn't work in Otara.
If you want to regulate alcohol in a way that is appropriate to the culture of the community then you have to regulate at the local community level, in a way appropriate to that community. I think that's precisely what our current licensing laws allow.
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Paul
Oh yes! That transition is great. We did that drive a few times as we drove friends from NZ around CA. And yes the drive back down the hill into the smog of Sacramento is not the most pleasing :).
But when we came from Texas we came over the hills further south, into Bakersfield. Now there's an ugly town! But the green hills were so reminiscent of NZ...
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What is it about driving? It seems we all have very strong memories associated with the road and the cars.
My father was a traveling salesman and spent one week out of every four on the road. I remember driving with him in his Holden station wagon during school holidays across the desert road. Such a strange landscape and I took it for granted until I drove literally thousands of miles in the US just to see that same landscape on a different continent.
I have two really vivid driving moments from the US. The first was the incredible joy that I felt as we drove over the hills out of the Californian desert. We were towing a U-Haul with all our belongings, having just escaped from Texas. The journey had been great with fantastic scenery, Southwest USA is spectacular. But I hadn't realised just how much I had missed seeing green grass. The moment we saw the lush valley below us was magical.
The other really strong memory of driving in the US was on one of our trips into San Francisco across The Bay Bridge. It's a nice bridge, I do like the tunnel in the middle, however it's not a quick journey, if you get out of second gear you are doing well. But on this one special trip we happened to put Mozart's Requiem in the CD player and the trip and music were both transformed. Now both the bridge and the music are forever entwined in my memory.