Mary Roach Quote

People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’ Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or defects, in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a hospital smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors leather and horse sweat are tells for the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces

Mary Roach

People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’ Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or defects, in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a hospital smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors leather and horse sweat are tells for the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces

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About Mary Roach

Mary Roach (born March 20, 1959) is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published seven New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021).