A Rum Infused Life

The numbers are in, and seven state wines emerged victorious from the Michigan Wine and Spirits Competition.

A big variety of wines were entered by 53 of the state’s 84 wineries. The following came out on top:

- Best of Class Dry White: Chateau Fontaine — 2010 Dry White Riesling

- Best of Class Dry Red: Fenn Valley Vineyards — Capriccio

- Best of Class Sparkling Wine: L. Mawby — Cremant Classic

- Best of Class Semi-Dry White (tie): Fenn Valley Vineyards — 2010 Reisling and Tabor Hill — 2010 Gewurztraminer

- Best of Class Rosé: Forty-Five North — 2010 Rosé of Cabernet Franc

- Best of Class Dessert Wine: Black Star Farms — 2008 A Capella Ice Wine

- Best of Class Fruit Wine: Garden Bay Winery — Raspberry Wine

From the BBC

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the occupants of southeastern France were brewing beer during the Iron Age, some 2,500 years ago.

A paper in Human Ecology outlines the discovery of barley grains that had been sprouted in a process known as malting; an oven found nearby may have been used to regulate the process.

Beer brewing’s heritage stretches back to the Bronze Age in China and the Middle East, but this is the earliest sign of the practice in France, where wine-making had already taken hold.

The recent find was in Roquepertuse, close to modern Aix-en-Provence, and was excavated in the 1990s.

Archaeologist Laurent Bouby from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research has been studying “archaeobotany” – preserved plant remains – in the region around Roquepertuse for more than a decade.

Wine not

Dr Bouby and his colleagues have now analysed the “macrobotanical” remains found at three sites during those digs: a paved floor near an oven and hearth of a home dated to the 5th Century BC, and a ceramic vessel and a pit that were near storage containers.

Ninety percent of the barley grains that were recovered from these locations had been induced to sprout.

The malted grains and the arrangement of the finds led the team to surmise a “home-brew” scenario, which they note requires no specialised equipment.

“All that is needed is an amount of grain, some water, containers (commonly pottery vessels) in which to soak the grain, a flat paved area – possibly the floor – to spread out and turn the grain during germination, an oven to dry it in order to stop germination, domestic grindstones to grind the malted grain, hearths and again containers for fermentation and storage,” they wrote.

“Evidence for all of these sorts of equipment is reported from the Roquepertuse dwelling.”

Prior studies suggest that a variant of the barley plant known as six-row barley was the primary cultivated plant in the region at the time; the authors of the study now suggest that beer production may have been one of the principal reasons for this.

I normally don’t dig slide shows, but this one is worthwhile.  Forty-nine varieties of chile peppers, from Saveur.

http://www.saveur.com/gallery/Chile-Pepper-Gallery

I need a beer.

It’s a phrase uttered by many contemporary workers after a long day at the office, but new research shows that ancient cultures were probably using the alcoholic beverage to treat much more than the stress of everyday life.

Anthropologists have found that thousands of years before the 1928 discovery of penicillin, people in ancient Nubia were using beer as an antibiotic to treat everything from gum disease to infected wounds.

It has been known for some time that the kingdom of Nubia, located south of Egypt in present-day Sudan, valued its brewers. More recently, however, scientists began to suspect that Nubian beer may have been brewed to contain more than just alcohol.

The suspicion arose after archeologists unearthed some unusual physical evidence. In 1980, George Armelagos, an anthropology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, led a team that discovered what seemed to be the antibiotic tetracycline in nearly 2,000-year-old Nubian bones.

http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_17494393?nclick_check=1