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Monday, April 24, 2023

ChatGPT on the comments on the Kerin O’Keefe article on decanting

I recently posted a Kerin O’Keefe article on wine decanting to my personal Facebook page as well as to the Barolo and Barbaresco Facebook group page. The article elicited strong responses and I thought it would be beneficial to capture them in a blog post for wider sharing.

At the completion of the data collation effort I decided to feed the material to ChatGPT to see how it would handle such a task.

Source: medium.com

I first asked it to summarize the Kerin O’Keefe article and the below was its work product. The prompt for summarization is TLDR followed by the web address of the target article.

Kerin O'Keefe, an experienced wine writer, advises wine enthusiasts to never decant older wines. Decanting can expose the wine to too much oxygen, which can diminish its flavors and aromas. Instead, O'Keefe suggests that you should open the bottle carefully and let the wine breathe naturally in the glass. If you need to remove any sediment, use a fine-mesh sieve or a decanting funnel with a filter. Overall, the goal is to preserve the wine's delicate nuances and characteristics.

Pretty good, I thought. I next prompted it to “Review and categorize the comments and write an article discussing the major items while highlighting the most impactful contributions. The below was its work product. 

The comments above highlight different perspectives on the decanting of wines. Some believe that decanting an old wine, especially a Barolo or Nebbiolo, may cause it to lose its aroma and flavor, while others argue that decanting a wine, young or old, can help improve its taste. Some say decanting depends on the producer, variety, age, and even weather conditions during the vintage. Some decant all young red wine, and others, most "older" red wine, but don't decant very old wine, red or white, unless it's not expressing its varietal character out of the bottle.

Interestingly, most of the comments suggest that decanting depends on the drinker's personal preference and experience. Jamie Pettigrew commented that wine preparation is just another "opinion," while Scott Walker advised letting the wine dictate what to do. Brad Smith said that it's a function of the wine's variety, age, and that specific bottle. Manuel Somohano suggested that decanting an old wine is to drink it right away, while Ken Vastola shared his experience of drinking a lot of old Nebbiolo that improved after decanting.

The most impactful contributions in these comments are that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to decanting wine. Every drinker has their own preferences, and it's essential to consider the wine's variety, age, and condition. Some wines may need decanting, while others don't, depending on how they express themselves in the bottle. It is, therefore, best to experiment with different decanting techniques or none at all and let the wine be the guide. As a drinker, you can also learn from your past experiences with a specific wine estate or producer to determine if decanting is necessary or not.

In conclusion, the comments above reveal a broad spectrum of perspectives on the decanting of wine. However, there is a consensus that decanting depends on personal preference, wine variety, age, and condition. Ultimately, the best way to find out what works for a specific wine is to experiment and trust your palate.

First, when I initially considered writing the article, I had grouped the comments according to those who agreed with Kerin, disagreed with her, fence-sitters, philosophers, etc. There was no such clear delineation in the package. Also, there were, in my opinion, impactful contributions from Manuel Burgï (again and again) and Rico Thompson but they were not called out by the bot. That being said, I thought this was a passable capturing of the themes of the comments.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Upending the story of ancient grapes: Genesis of the effort

A recently published grapevine genetic study (Y. Dong, et al., Dual domestications and origin of traits in grapevine evolution, Science 379 (6635), pp. 892 - 900, 3/3/23) "has upended the history of how humans first domesticated grapes for winemaking ..." (Melanie Lidman, It's in the DNA, Times of Israel, 3/25/23). That history had been widely accepted among wine- and grape-history researchers and had served as the jumping-off point for all of the ancient wine reporting of this blog (I have, to date, covered Armenia (wine history and winemaking), Iran, and Lebanon (the Phoenicians and Renaissance interruptus).).

The core elements of this now-discounted history was that the wine grape Vitis vinifera split from its wild progenitor Vitis sylvestris as a result of a single-point domestication event which occurred 8000 years ago somewhere in the Caucasus. From that point the domesticated cultivar spread through ancient Middle Eastern kingdoms and eventually into Europe.


According to Dong, et al., there had been previous genetic grapevine studies but "critical details of grapevine domestication were inconsistent":
  • Multiple centers (Western Mediterranean, Caucasus, Central Asia) had been identified as the initial domestication site
  • Three demographic inferences yielded population split times to dates between 15,000 and 400,000 years ago
  • The single-origin theory did not bring clarity to the origin order as regards table and wine grapes
    • One school held that wine grapes came first, with table grapes splitting off ~2500 years ago
    • Several studies suggest that the earliest cultivation of European wine grapes in France and Iberia can be traced back earlier than 3000 years ago.
Those discrepancies, according to Dong, et al., arise from "inadequate sampling of grapevine accessions" (genetic material) and "limited resolution of genetic data" in prior studies.

The objectives of the Dong, et al., study were to:
  1. Build a grapevine genomic dataset from a global cohort
  2. Analyze the contents to: 
    1. systematically delineate the structure of grapevine genetic diversity
    2. explore the origin of V. vinifera
    3. deduce a putative dispersal history
    4. investigate key domestication traits and diversification signatures.
Before I get into the study design, implementation, and results, let me take you back to its origin story.

Origin of the Study Effort
According to Lidman, Dr. Wei Chen (Yunnan Agricultural Institution, Southwest China) began sequencing grape DNA in 2017 as part of a study on Chinese grape cultivars. The lab sequenced almost 500 grapevines and found that the DNA allowed them to track:
  • the way different varieties migrated across the country
  • how cultivars split off from one another to form distinct varieties.
This brought him to the realization that, with enough DNA, he could map the migration of different grape varieties through space and time.

In 2019 Dr Chen and his lab launched an international research project focusing on grape cultivars and reached out to colleagues around the world asking them to contribute material towards the study. Colleagues in Germany, France, and Spain sent either dried young leaves -- which the lab could use to extract and sequence DNA -- or sequenced DNA of local varieties. These friends and colleagues also contributed by recruiting other participants into the program.

The lab began looking for patterns in the DNA after they had received samples from 90 scientists in 70 countries.

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I will report on the study execution and findings in a subsequent post.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme