Yeast as part of Terroir

[SFJoe]

originally posted by Ken Schramm:
Pinned down by booze.

Hilarious.

 

[Ken Schramm]

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM): BTW, was early agriculture just intensive gathering? E.G. clear the weeds and brush away from the good plants, reseed and maybe water them?

A case can be made for the idea that grapes or other fruits could have been domesticated very easily by layering. Female grape vines growing on trees could have made this evident - low-hanging branch with vine breaks off and falls - independently rooted fruit bearing vine arises on the distal side of the decaying limb. Humans could imitate this; put in a stick as a post, affix the vine to establish and support a fruit bearing section, drag it down and bury (layer) it, post, layer, post, layer. Sounds kind of familiar. Lots of fruit, all in a row at a level you can harvest easily, as opposed to the stuff 40 feet up the tree.

This is interesting.

15 gallon batches. Tough to take on the road.

 

[Ken Schramm]

Layered vines don't even actually have to be buried, they'll root if they stay in contact with the ground long enough. FWIW, I actually thought that a layering form of domestication might be represented on the shard in Figure 4.2 on page 76 of McGovern's "Ancient Wine."

Patrick disagrees, and since he's seen the shard in person and all I have to go on is the picture, who am I to differ?

 

[Christian Miller (CMM)]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

I thought the development of beer coincided with the observation of weekly games, hence it would have followed rather than preceded a more settled life style.

there is reason to think the taste for hooch may be somewhat older than that.

fb.

I wasn't really serious, just influenced by it being playoff season. I fear my weak humor is imperceptible in the smoke of the academic firefight.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

I thought the development of beer coincided with the observation of weekly games, hence it would have followed rather than preceded a more settled life style.

there is reason to think the taste for hooch may be somewhat older than that.

fb.

I wasn't really serious, just influenced by it being playoff season. I fear my weak humor is imperceptible in the smoke of the academic firefight.

context. all this talk of glyphs put me in mind of games that involved feeding the unwashed to lions.

i am a tube,

fb.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
fb, is the decipherment of forgotten scripts in your opinion possible?

up to a point, but only up to a point. if your question is, could you ever understand an ancient script like a native speaker, my answer is no. not possible. i walk with quine and wittgenstein on this one, if only because doing so seems to work.

that does not mean that i don't think trying to do the best one can is pointless (or that it isn't fun, or intellectually worthwhile, for that matter).

fb.

 

[Saina Nieminen]

Thanks fb, that answer convinces me that we are talking of such different things with so little overlap that it's pointless to continue. That you feel the need to put a phrase like "if your question is, could you ever understand an ancient script like a native speaker, my answer is no. not possible," suggests that you don't understand what decipherment or that you think that I think that it is something more than what it is. Now it's back to drinking poison for me.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
"all orthographic systems are parasitic on speech. if you think that a logographic system can go straight from a cartoon of a bird to the idea "bird" without being conditioned on a speech system, you are seriously delusional."

If you mean by these sentences, all phonetically spelled writing, then the statement is trivially true. If you mean, as your second sentence says, all logographic systems, then the statement is emirically false. Neither mathematics, nor ASL are parasitic on speech, to use your terms. Even Derrida, who would have liked your statement to be true, recognized that what he called phonocentrism was tied forms of language tied to phonetic writing systems (logocentrism he thought to be a necessity of thought). My point, please, is not to get into a discussion of Derrida, but simply to note that even he knew that not all writing or sign systems were parasitic on speech. What this does to your larger argument, to the extent that I can make it out, I don't know.

as i hope i'd made clear, writing is not phonetically spelled. jesus. do none of you people remember the great disaster that this shit lead to in 70s eductaionz?

as for the question of whether or not sign languages and math are parasitic on speech or not, i'm really fucking glad that you have decided to resolve this one by fiat. it could have saved a lot of people from wasting a lot of time trying to use evidence based methods to examine the question. i stll have one empirical question though: did you pull the answer out of derrida's ass, or was the proclamation your own invention?

seriously, while i'm happy to admit that there is a lot of complicated shit at stake, and there may well be no way of answering these questions definitively, there are actually many good reasons to believe that math and sign languages are parasitic on not only speech, but also on the development of orthography too. it's a long story, which i'll ink in, if pushed, but for now, look over your shoulder, and check out that big elephant of history waving his trunk in your general direction.

if the history of language was a jeebus, then orthography came in around the point that kane grossed everyone out by opening far more dessert wine than the assembled drunks could even contemplate drinking, math came in around the time everyone took to their cabs, and sign languages emerges around the time that the restaurant owner locked the doors and mulled over the pros and cons of getting rid of some frozen steaks versus filling his joint with drunken cheap skates. it, uh, unlike a jeebus, the history of language kind of suggests an order of precedence.

fb.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

Ghoti, anyone?

 

[Saina Nieminen]

Just eating some while trying to re-read and understand all these arguments once more.

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

fb,

I expect I got my misbegotten notions about mathematical language from Leibniz, further confirmed by numbers of other philosophers. I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong, but neither your rant (which I can't decipher), nor the site you refer to, which is about the understanding of words for math numerals, gets anywhere near to making things clear to me. Here is the usual issue. The following sentence (and I use the word advisedly):

2 + 2=4

can be understood in that form by natives speakers of any number of different languages who have been instructed in the language of math equations. It clearly isn't "parasitic," on any given spoken language, nor does it come from any of them. And this is true regardless of whether it was originally invented by a native speaker of some given language. It is its own language. Now it may be the case that we learn its meaning, each through our own language in various ways that may make our translations go back through, for me, for instance, an English sentence such as:
two plus two equals four.

But that hardly shows that the sentence 2 + 2=4 is parasitic on the English sentence.

Equally, speakers of ASL can speak to each other regardless of what spoken language they might or might not speak. Otto was more nearly correct (though only more nearly) in complaining that ASL isn't writing but "speech" with waving fingers. It is nevertheless the case, that the language is non-phonetic, and not an encoding of some other phonetic language, as far as I understand. I don't see how it can be parasitic on speech.

I really am happy to be instructed differently, but to do so, you might actually respond to what is being said here.

And now, again, I really don't understand what you are doing, other than objecting loudly to everything in sight. What is the position you are trying to defend? Why does the notion that some languages are not parasitic on speech (a position Derrida would prefer not to admit, but even he does, so I didn't pull it out of his ass, or any other part of his body)matter to that position? Is there something you are trying to say? In all modesty, I'm not seeing it. It may be me. But I'm sure you can spell it out in sufficiently simplistic language.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Ghoti, anyone?

i once gave sounds files of people saying "tough," "women" and "nation." in nice clear voices to the kids in a class i was teaching. their task was to edit the constituents of the files so as make the word "fish" out of g.h.o.t.i. without fucking with the actual sound signals they were given. if they didn't manage to do that, they could write up what they did, and why, and explain why they thought it didn't work.

although a lot of these kids were stanford cs students, it turned out that no one managed it. i had to read all their fucking write ups before i could assign grades. turns out there's a often million miles between what we actually here, and what we think we hear once we're done filling in te gaps based on all the shit we expect to hear.

fb.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
fb,

I expect I got my misbegotten notions about mathematical language from Leibniz, further confirmed by numbers of other philosophers. I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong, but neither your rant (which I can't decipher), nor the site you refer to, which is about the understanding of words for math numerals, gets anywhere near to making things clear to me. Here is the usual issue. The following sentence (and I use the word advisedly):

2 + 2=4

can be understood in that form by natives speakers of any number of different languages who have been instructed in the language of math equations. It clearly isn't "parasitic," on any given spoken language, nor does it come from any of them. And this is true regardless of whether it was originally invented by a native speaker of some given language. It is its own language. Now it may be the case that we learn its meaning, each through our own language in various ways that may make our translations go back through, for me, for instance, an English sentence such as:
two plus two equals four.

But that hardly shows that the sentence 2 + 2=4 is parasitic on the English sentence.

this is a half-assed reply. i apologize. it's late here and I'm running out the door.

but if your go back to the paper i pointed you to and read the brief section on how we actually come to learn the meaning of 2 and 4: it requires not only a language, but a language that is organized in such a way that it allows the speakers of a community to situate the relationship between "two" and two in a given system of sound / meaning discriminations. if the speakers of a language can't rouse themselves to do that, then any talk of math is off the menu. if they can organize themselves to do that (because they have a speech system and have developed the notions of orthography that allow them to situate all the math talk they want to devise in a system of conventions that can support it, then they are free to proceed.

give them long enough, and they might even start to come to grips with probability. might.

they might even proceed to develop a system of conventions that they share with other languages, as indeed we do with math, html and porn site search queries. and while you are right that math isn't "parasitic," on any given spoken language, and nor does it come from any of one them -- it takes its characters from the middle east, its logic from the anglo saxons, and those few conventions that seek to understand probability from a rag bag of card sharps, religious fanatics and nerdy geniuses --but this simply underlines the point that a language is what a community makes it. in the case of math, what this tells us is that for a long time, mathematicians have preferred to talk to each other, whatever their native language. but this only means that math is the language of mathematicians, just as there are some people whose understanding of english sort of approximates one another close enough that we can call them a community, and their shared tongue a language.

the residue to all this blurb is simply that if you think that math exists independently of a community that agrees mathematical usage conventions, you are far closer to the greeks than any eductaterized citizen of the 21st century ought to be (and hey, we now know what happens to the greeks in act VII, and it ain't pretty).

a final consideration: lots of people who don't use math in their everyday lives have a very distorted idea about the content of mathematical notation (viz otto's story about the precision of math above). rather than wax philosophical, i'll simply point you at two of the most illustrative counter-examples to this that i personally know of (given the denizens of the disorderly, i have no doubt that we will soon have a whole data base of this shit).

from my limited perspective, two of the more interesting bits of math from the last century are shannon's definition of the entropy in a signal, and rescorla & wagner's definition of a simple error-based learning rule that could capture a huge array of behavioral findings in the animal and human literature.

these are two of the very coolest ideas of the last century: shannon basically invented the information age -- along with card counting -- and though you may not realize it, pretty much every aspect of the electronic interaction we are having is being facilitated by shannon's equations; rescorla & wagner opened up a tractable way of thinking about learning that ultimately has its echoes in every successful engagement with the interweb that you have. they also share an interesting trait: outside of a very small field of specialists, pretty much everything you read about information theory (shannon's baby) and learning theory (rescorla & wagner's) is based on such a catastrophic misunderstanding of the math as to be the opposite of informative: put simply, the vast majority of mathematically literate people who look at the shannon equations and the rescorla & wagner equations fuck.it.up.

and they don't fuck.it.up. because they don't know math. they fuck.it.up. because the semantics of mathematical equations are much like the semantics of language: the code is an abstraction, and your understanding depends on the interpretative knowledge that you bring to it. (in a very real sense, you can only understand something when you are on the cusp of being able to generate it yourself).

yeah yeah, it's a nice story. but why should you believe my claim that everyone gets the semantics of the equations wrong? well, hopefully here's one reason why you should. shannon and rescorla were both so totally annoyed by the wankers jizzing all over their intellectual legacy that they wrote about it. their papers are not subtle.

shannon's was written in 56 (less than a decade after he published the mathematicsl theory of communication). its title is, unambiguously, "the bandwagon," and in it, he laments the widespread misapplication of his math. rescorla's paper was written nearly 20 years after the first article, but its message in the same. it is called, "pavlovian conditioning: it is not what you think it is." and it systematically takes down the ridiculous nonsense taught about learning in textbooks (here's a neat twist: claims about what this misunderstood conception of learning can and can't do dominate modern day linguists, and are used to justify phlogistonic horseshit like phonemes, morphemes and the like... )

so where are we? is math parasitic on speech? if you can't get to math without speech (and perhaps, even orthography)-- and if speech and linguistic convention learning are a necessary precondiion to math, i'd say yes. i'd also add that i'd rather take my theory of math from shannon that derrida, because i trust that shannon actually knew what he was talking about. your mileage may differ. but if so, why?

as for sign languages, it gets harder and more speculative. but there are good reasons to believe that speech is a better medium for getting language off of the ground than gesture (for one, the dimensional properties of our auditory cortex are far more conducive to the learning of low dimensional symbols than those of the visual cortex, which is why you never see anything as dramatic as the loss of l2 sound contrast discriminations in vision). as ever the story is complex and empirical, but hey, when you build math models of this shit, you get predictionds, and the predictionds turn out to be right, which always feels like understanding (to me, anyway).

my phone says i'm keeping people waiting.

fb.

 

[nigel groundwater]

Wow and OMG and anything else that might allow the possibility, albeit obliquely, of a return to a consideration of SFJoe's original post :-) ?

If the current dialectic forbids then o.k. but if not here's a further thought addressing his headline of 'yeasts as part of terroir' as long as one accepts the idea that the yeasts including Saccharomyces.cerevisiae that ferment the grapes from adjacent vineyards in a particular winery can have a significantly separate [wild] identity to other locations/regions - as indicated by the relevant papers mentioned in this thread.

Even with that acceptance [which, as Joe suggests, overturns some long held notions] the wider definition of terroir, and its part in defining how a particular wine presents, might tend to dominate such a discussion. However to the extent that such 'local' yeasts have some continuously recognisable features and function as a population i.e. some sort of permanence [like the soil, drainage, orientation] despite local evolution there would seem to be a case for considering them as part of terroir.

Even if evolutionary changes in the local yeast population were large, as long as it remained significantly different to others i.e. separately identified with that/those vineyard/s a ‘terroir’ case could presumably still be made.

However I suspect the argument over the major implications of these studies will need to be settled before any notion of local yeasts, particularly localised Saccharomyces.cerevisiae, being within the definition of terroir can be successfully debated.

OTOH the thread drift and argument in this thread has been on an epic scale and might even be a record of some sort perhaps the ‘views’ will ultimately decide. It has certainly been interesting.

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by nigel groundwater:
OTOH the thread drift and argument in this thread has been on an epic scale and might even be a record of some sort perhaps the ‘views’ will ultimately decide. It has certainly been interesting.

Perhaps, in due course, it will that ultimate accolade, the receipt of a FFF (or should that be fff?) designation (more selective and less common than trois etoiles).

Otto - many thanks for the correction re the history of cuneiform. I bow to your erudition on the subject, especially as the information I quoted was obtained at third hand at best.

Retreating to the sidelines,
Mark Lipton

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by fatboy:
turns out there's a often million miles between what we actually here, and what we think we hear once we're done filling in te gaps based on all the shit we expect to hear.

It smees to heav wrkoed fro Shwa.

 

[Christian Miller (CMM)]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

I thought the development of beer coincided with the observation of weekly games, hence it would have followed rather than preceded a more settled life style.

there is reason to think the taste for hooch may be somewhat older than that.

fb.

I wasn't really serious, just influenced by it being playoff season. I fear my weak humor is imperceptible in the smoke of the academic firefight.

context. all this talk of glyphs put me in mind of games that involved feeding the unwashed to lions.

i am a tube,

fb.

As I recall, the lions dominated the first half, but after Constantine made adjustments at half time, it was all Christians.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by nigel groundwater:

It has of course been amply demonstrated, where commercial yeasts have been used in a winery, that ferments can begin spontaneously with the [no longer inoculated] commercial yeast later found to have been a substantial part of the fermentation. So one might consider how 'natural' [in the sense of local and wild] a ferment is despite its apparent spontaneity.

However one of the key points in the earlier Goddard paper was that they had carefully tested the winery for Saccharomyces prior to their research and found none which bolstered their hypothesis [despite the fact that it was not the main focus of their study] that the main fermentation yeast/s had come in with the grapes.

The actual words used were: "Local natural isolates of S. cerevisiae are related to a subset of the fermentation strains
What then is the origin(s) of this population? Since we failed to detect any S. cerevisiae in the winery before harvest (winery equipment and walls were sampled, data not shown), we hypothesized that the strains contributing to the ferment were brought into the winery with the grapes and represent members of populations inhabiting the local environment."

Another conclusion, more directly related to the purpose of their research was:
"Of the 172 genotypes of S. cerevisiae contemporaneously isolated from ferments, soil, bark and flowers in NZ, none clustered strongly with any of the 34 sequenced strains isolated from a range of international locations.

We believe this provides strong evidence for a discrete population of S. cerevisiae residing in NZ. Bayesian and network analyses show this NZ population not to be homogenous but structured into a number of clusters.

I'm totally game to drift the thread back to microbial ecology. Why not?

Updated from the results of the recent paper. This refers to the samples from the 3/4 complete fermentations, not the wild population on the grapes:

S. cerevisiae population structure—ferment samples
We ascertained the microsatellite profiles of 353
individual S. cerevisiae isolates from 16 Chardonnay
and five Syrah ferments across the three regions.
A total of 274 different genotypes were revealed,
indicating a highly diverse population of S. cerevisiae.
Of the 216 alleles we identified, 125 were novel
compared with a previous NZ population examined
from Auckland ferment and environmental samples
(Goddard et al., 2010); however, all the genotypes
discovered here were distinct. We compared these
genotypes with our database of 79 commercial wine
strains commonly used in NZ (Richards et al., 2009),
and only one of the 82 isolates deriving from the
Hawke’s Bay Chardonnay ferments matched. Six genotypes
differed at just one allele from a commercial
strain, but the remaining genotypes differed at many
alleles; thus, these data further support the concept
that a diverse natural population of S. cerevisiae
resides in NZ (Goddard et al., 2010).

 

[David Erickson]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):

I thought the development of beer coincided with the observation of weekly games, hence it would have followed rather than preceded a more settled life style.

there is reason to think the taste for hooch may be somewhat older than that.

fb.

"Preference for and excessive consumption of alcohol by modern humans might then derive from pre-existing sensory biases associating ethanol with ancestral dietary strategies."

Ah, so that's it...

 

[SFJoe]

Smells kinda like mom, doesn't it?