The Wine Lab
The Wine Lab is an educational wine podcast where wine meets science, history, culture, and the occasional myth that deserves to be retired. Hosted by wine scientist and enologist Dr. Andreea Botezatu, each episode explores how wine is grown, made, tasted, misunderstood, and enjoyed.
Created for curious wine lovers, students, winemakers, and anyone who wants to understand wine a little better, The Wine Lab combines accessible wine education with wine science, grape varieties, wine regions, sensory science, winemaking, history, and culture.
Expect clear explanations, curious stories, and enough technical detail to be useful without making you feel as though you accidentally enrolled in a chemistry class.
The Wine Lab
From Seawater to Bullock’s Blood: A Strange History of Wine
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For thousands of years, winemakers have been trying to solve the same problems: wines that were too acidic, cloudy, unstable, oxidized, or simply didn't taste very good. The solutions, however, could get interesting.
Ancient wines were treated with seawater, pine resin, herbs, honey, cedar oil, powdered marble, gypsum, ashes and, in some cases, dangerously, lead. Later winemakers clarified wine with egg whites, fish swim bladders, milk proteins and even bullock's blood.
In this episode of The Wine Lab, we travel through roughly 8,000 years of people trying to “fix” wine. Along the way, we look at what these strange additions were supposed to accomplish, the chemistry that sometimes made them surprisingly effective, and the practices that survived into modern winemaking.
From ancient aromatized wines to modern vermouth and from powdered marble to today's calcium carbonate, some historical ideas are much less bizarre than they first appear.
Others involve bullock's blood.
Those are harder to defend.
For more detailed wine science checkout my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@Enology_channel