We recently reported on wine that was alleged to have been made for Adolf Hitler, and this drew a response from reader Frank Green of New York City, who “tried this vintage” and sent us a review:

“This wine is very bold, with a very bitter after-taste. Doesn’t sit well with Russian food, completely dominates French cuisine, but can be successfully paired with tortellini and sushi.

“It has a full bodied taste with hints of black currant, leather, gunpowder, steel, burnt  wood and brick. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is ‘beware.’ This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

“Ultimately its taste will die in the cellar, although it still may be found in select South American cafes. Palate best cleared with American and U.K. domestic brews.”

(It’s difficult to drink wine when your tongue is in your cheek.)

More on Hitler wine

An Italian prosecutor has seized wine bottle labels with Hitler’s portrait, saying that the labels “constitute a glorification of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity,” according to an item on AFP.

They are part of a historical line of wines produced since 1995 by the Lunardelli winery, which includes labels featuring, among others, Winston Churchill, Karl Marx, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini and Che Guevara. The Web site said the Mussolini labels were not seized.

(Anyone want to review the wines of the other historical figures?) 

Drinking and flying

Does wine smell and taste differently when you’re flying in an airplane?

A professor at Ruhr University in Germany says it does, according to earthtimes.org. He attributes the change to humidity, saying that “the mucous membrane in the nose begins to dry so the cells responsible for smell can no longer pick up the wine odor that well.”

A German Master of Wine added, “The tannic acids become more pronounced in the clouds with the sweetness fading.”

(This will probably result in someone somewhere coming up with a cross-country winetasting on a 747.)

Spanish labor problems

Half of Spain’s wine crop may be in danger of rotting on the vines because of bureaucratic decisions and fears over immigrants flooding the area.

Up to 20,000 people come to Spain from eastern Europe to help with the harvest, many of them from Romania and Bulgaria. An item on timesonline.co.uk said the mayor of a small community ordered 2,000 Romanians expelled, and another town nearby also expelled several thousand. They’re in Spain legally because they are European Union citizens, but they just couldn’t pick grapes because of a paperwork snafu, so they just hung around.

In order to avoid a heavy influx of immigrants, Spain recently passed a law that anyone wishing to employ workers from Romania and Bulgaria must contract for them in those countries, although seasonal work, such as grape picking, is exempted. But the wineries must prove its seasonal work and foreign workers must be returned to their homes after harvest. The current problem arose because the wineries failed to produce the necessary paperwork in time.

Now there are 12,000 applications still pending, and harvest is upon them.

(Sounds like bureaucracies are the same all over the world.)

Wine as a mining tool

Wine has long been known to be beneficial to a person’s health, but now it can help find new mineral deposits in the ground.

Sciencedaily.com writes about Ryan Noble, a scientist in Australia who found that chemical ingredients in wine, and also found in soft drinks, containing weak organic acids can mix with soil, and the acids dissolve some of the metals into a solution, which then can easily be detected in routine lab analysis.

This will steer miners to where the mineral deposits can be found. “They are particularly good at discovering elevated levels of metal, such as silver, zinc, copper and nickel,” Noble said. He added that in many cases the comparisons of metals extracted with wine and soft drinks were superior to those extracted using conventional, and more expensive methods.

(If there’s a correlation to the price of wine and the value of the metal, what would a bottle of Screaming Eagle find?)

Small town, big bottles

A restaurant in St. Christoph (population 32), a tiny town in the Austrian Alps, has a wine collection of more than 12,000 bottles — and almost all of them are big — really big — up to 15 liters, and its estimated value is $5 million.

Winemag.com reports that Hospiz Alm has one of the biggest collections of large format bottles in the world, and a recent wine tasting dinner featured magnums of all five of the French First Growths, all from the 1875 vintage. No mention of the cost of the dinner, though.

(It may be worth climbing the Alps to see this place.)

Quote of the week

“A bottle of wine begs to be shared. I have never met a miserly wine lover.” — Clifton Fadiman

Jack Heeger can be reached at jheeger@napanews.com.