What’s nasty about it? The products are things like ethanol, butyric acid, carbon dioxide.
The Germans leave grapes on the wine to rot for varying periods, and the names of German wines reflect how long they have been left (Spätlese, Auslese), but the most expensive of the lot are edelfäule (literally noble rot) for which the French also have the term “pourriture noble”. Getting it right is a skilled process and for the most expensive wines berries are hand selected. The wines resulting are particularly concentrated and sweet, explaining Rilke’s line “und jage die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein” (I put that in to raise the cultural tone a little and because I like Rilke and hope a few other people will discover him.)*
In traditional wine making, of course, some of the yeasts came from between the toes of the young ladies trampling the grapes. And in cider making, a dead rat or two used to be added to the mix to provide a little protein to encourage the natural apple yeasts to grow.
It isn’t surprising that there are links between brewing, breadmaking and witchcraft. (nb I don’t regard witchcraft as a negative, just one of the many prescientific attempts at understanding the natural world.) Let’s leave fear of women’s bodies (and indeed natural processes) to the priests of the Abrahamic religions.
*The verse from which that comes is actually an accurate summary of how to produce the best sweet German dessert wine. Useless trivia dept.
Moles Brewery. I think the inhabitants of Melksham would disapprove of the description “a town near Bath”, but otherwise absolutely correct.
My information on cider making came from our 6th form organic chemistry teacher, who had done some research for Bullmers; he said the rat ingredient is absolutely veridical but beef extract would do equally well. My information on wine brewing comes from both French and German sources. Over the years of being in technology-related businesses, I’ve found that expressing an interest in things gets you to some interesting places.
You totally jogged my memory. The town I had it in was Keynsham, which is closer to Bristol than Bath, but since I drove through bath that’s how I remember it.
It was awesome. I got shitfaced on black rat, the proms were on, the bald proprietor was singing along, and the local rugby club with traffic cones on their heads shambled in.
Lovely fellows, but they kept pronouncing Oregon as Oregano.
Being grossed out by something is, in most cases, an irrational response to a stimulus. That’s fine, I’d wager everyone does it for one reason or another. However, if you refuse to challenge your own assumptions about why you are grossed out, and/or you use the experiment as an excuse to degrade/discount/tear down a woman, that colours you un-hip.
People around here tend not to be too good on the US. They tend to know roughly where Florida is, and the rest of it is a big dark mystery. Some years ago I went on a business trip there with two other managers at the company I worked for who I didn’t know too well. The other two got so drunk at Gatwick that TWA (yes, that long ago) said they would only allow them on the plane if I accepted responsibility for them. You can imagine how well I got on with them during and after the trip.
It eventually turned out that neither of them had been to the US before and they were actually quite terrified of going.
I was on a business trip once in South Africa when I got to know a (white) guy sufficiently well to discover he had connections to the ANC. He told me a number of stories, but the one that sticks in my mind is that a lot of white people, particularly Afrikaners, would tell you that Africans “smelled funny” and you couldn’t trust them. The same people that went to restaurants where black Africans were waiting on tables and doing the cooking…
They would also complain that you couldn’t go to the cinema at the university because you might, all unknowing, find yourself sitting next to a black African when the lights went up.
The thing about unthinking prejudices is that yes, they’re unthinking.
I’m with you on women’s bodies, but natural doesn’t mean harmless. Fermentation still produces poisons. Just because we happen to enjoy the poison we call ethanol, it doesn’t mean that it’s harmless, as demonstrated by a lot of suffering caused by the drug. Leaving all that aside though, my point is just that from the same perspective that considers this gross, all fermentation is equally gross.
