exchemist

Merlot is blended with Cabernet Franc in St. Emilion. I don’t think you find it on its own much in Europe.

OK, I've had enough of you now. You are going on the Ignore list.

Whut? So an overseas part of the Netherlands then. This is what the French do. I've been to Martinique and to la Reunion, both of which are France d'outre-mer. And I've been once on business to Surinam, which is independent but fairly Dutch. I remember I flew back (KLM to Schiphol, of course) on the Queen's birthday and all the stewardesses wore orange ribbons.

Well Dutch cheese is generally nothing special. There's a lot of it, but it's almost all just variations on one variety, so far as I can see: the Gouda type, in those huge wheels. When we lived in The Hague we did find a boerenkaas that had good flavour but even that was just similar to a good Cheddar or a Comté, so nothing very special. Everything is from cow's milk. They make one blue cheese in the whole of the Netherlands and that is a recent introduction. As for the beer, my impression was most of the good stuff came from Belgium. But I expect there are some good little breweries if one seeks them out. Where are you? Surinam?

Amarone is powerful stuff. I used to find it a bit dehydrating. I've never been bothered headaches from wine, but I have always had a large glass of water to hand when there is wine on the table. Nowadays my intake is restricted, especially in the evening, due to a tendency for getting A Fib at night.

Blind tastings are very common in the wine world, and often reveal surprises that put previously little known producers on the map.They can also expose lazy winemaking by those who trade on previous reputation.

Oh yes I agree it's better to drink wine with food generally speaking. My story is simply to show that a wide group of people, with different experience and tastes, can come to a common judgement about the relative merits of different wines, and that that judgement correlates with the judgement of those who get to determine the price. This ought not to be surprising, as there are centuries of experience and expertise devoted to making good wine. These French and Italian vignerons have been doing it for generations. It's not just for fun or to bullshit the public. It wasn't from me but your point, whatever it was supposed to be, was unclear to say the least.

Are you stupid? I've just told you we did not know what the wine was until after we had commented on it.

..or even "that which I don't understand".

Proof? Proof is for logicians. But evidence? That I can give you. OK, when I was at Shell a group of us got invited to a wine tasting evening at Berry Bros. We were a complete mixture, some with some knowledge of wine, others not. We had a lot of fun learning the difference in taste between Beaujolais (Gamay) , Pinot Noir from different places etc. At the end they gave us one more to taste, without telling us what it was. Everyone - and I mean everyone - went quiet and said it this something really special, way ahead of anything else. They then revealed it was a £100/bbl mature Bordeaux. People can tell. It's not just bullshit. It's a bit like my late wife, who expressed no interest in cars. However once in a while she'd comment: "Ooh , that's a nice car", to which my reply would be: "That's a Rolls-Royce" or "That's a Jaguar".

Speak for yourself.

The same is true of written Arabic, at least for some vowels, presumably owing to their common root.

I've looked this up. It seems high diastolic pressure can be a problem in itself, indicating an abnormal degree of resistance to blood flow, rather than lack of elasticity in the arteries. I don't think 120/80 is particularly good. It seems nowadays to be regarded as the upper limit of normal. But at least it's not on my list of health conditions to worry about. I have others, as most people my age do.

Well I admit I'm not in the US but my impression is he has lost support, at least among people who are not crazy. After last time, I doubt huge numbers would turn out to try to overthrow the forces of law and order just because he gets his collar felt for knobbing this woman and trying to cover it up.

I'm looking forward to this. If he is arrested, then I suspect no more than a handful of obvious crazies with beards and MAGA caps will show up. That will do wonders to marginalise him. But he probably won't be arrested. The BBC has a great picture of him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65000325 He looks like just another crazy old man with dementia.

The logic of your post indicates 90. Is this a trick question? I presume the difference between the two is a measure of elasticity in the arteries. A difference >40 could suggest inability to stretch sufficiently, under the pressure of the pulse of the heartbeat. But I'm not medical. When I was still rowing, mine used to be 100/60. Nowadays it is 120/80. I'm 68.

Going backwards with your mind seems to be a personal speciality. Look, "in science", as a schoolteacher friend of mine says, "you can't just make shit up". You need evidence from observation and you need to show that your theory can predict what sorts of further observation we should expect. Without that, it's what on this forum is known as a WAG, a Wild-Arsed Guess. That isn't science - and the moderators here won't like it. I'm not sure what you mean by electrons being little spherical balls, but that has not been the model we have of the electron for the last hundred years.

There are several acids: tartaric, citric, malic and maybe more. Tartaric and malic are dibasic and citric is tribasic. Each carboxylate group will have a different tendency to release H+ (different pKa). All are contributing to the overall H+ concentration. To make matters worse, you can get (as a winemaker you may indeed want) malolactic fermentation, which converts some of the malic acid into lactic acid, which is monobasic, with a fairly low pKa. I imagine the mouth feel and perceived acidity of the wine may depend on how much of each is present. Since saliva is slightly basic, you could perhaps get a sort of buffering situation in your mouth. Quite complicated, I would think.

I assume the idea of titration is to determine the amount of acid present rather than just the pH. As there are several weak acids present in wine, the pH will tell you the concentration of H+, but that won't tell you how much of the acid molecules there are, since they are only partially dissociated and if there are several you won't be able to correlate an H+ concentration with the total amount of all of them. But I'm guessing a bit.

There is an account of what has been found here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data. which is not behind a paywall. It seems the international team has found evidence from details of DNA sequences, uploaded by the Chinese analysts who sequenced the Covid +ve swabs in question to an international database called Gisaid. These sequences have since been taken down without explanation by the Chinese, but not before they have been copied. So the mystery now is why the Chinese researchers originally claimed there was no animal DNA, and why they seem now to be covering the fact there was in fact animal DNA after all. One might think that the Chinese authorities would be very keen to claim the virus came from animals and not from a leak from one of their own labs. It is also not clear to me at least, exactly what these swabs were, i.e. from where and when they were taken. I start to wonder if there is a disinformation game of some kind going on.

This reads like the complaint of someone that does not understand a subject and decides to attack those who do instead of getting the books out and bothering to learn. Choice of units is basically irrelevant to the complexity or otherwise of physics. Such complexity as it has is the result of applying Ockham's Razor. This does NOT, as some people fondly imagine, argue for simplicity above all else, but for no more complexity than is necessary to fit the facts. So, to the extent physical science is complex, it is because that's what observing nature tells us it is like. You can't wish it away just because of your lack of understanding.

Yes some truth in that. Some English méthode champenoise can be rated as highly in tastings as champagne these days, now that English producers are learning how to grow the grapes (chardonnay and pinot noir I think) and make it well. I was given a bottle of vintage Nyetimber some years ago which I forgot about and then found and opened last year, by which time it was starting to go a bit orange, and it was very good indeed. But when I visit Oncle Philippe in Rouen, for gatherings of my wife's family, he generally serves Deutz, which I like very much, so that's what's in my cellar. I don't drink champagne often enough to start experimenting with English producers.

Chaptalisation. It’s still allowed but less necessary because of climate change. The issue now, increasingly, tends to be holding the degree of ripeness down, to avoid excess alcohol which upsets the balance of the wine.

I would certainly try that. It never ceases to amaze me how many extraneous ingredients manufacturers seem to need to add to ready meals. Also you can cook the onions slowly which may help. I don't seem to be bothered by oligosaccharides myself, so can't advise from experience. But I do have quite a lot of garlic, brassica vegetables and lentils in my diet so, looking at @StringJunky's explanation, it may be that I have reached equilibrium in my gut long ago and that's why.

I don't think this is right, actually. According to the link below, in the UK the tax per bottle is the same for any wine between 5.5 and 15%. https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-decanter-357119/ Furthermore, as a rule, expensive wine has no higher alcohol content than cheap wine. A bottle of good Bordeaux will have an alcohol content of 12.5-13% and cost £20-50 per bbl, whereas a bottle of supermarket plonk will have the same or slightly higher alcohol and cost under a tenner. Table wines in general are between 12% and 15% in alcohol, which is not that much of a variation from the health point of view. (Though personally, having a susceptibility to atrial fibrillation, I admit I tend to avoid wine >13.5% and beer >4.5%, to improve my chances of staying out of trouble). Fortified wines are something else, port being ~20% for example. And it's true they can be jolly expensive. But again that's not really due to alcohol content. You can see from the link the difference is only a pound at the most.