Licensed to Kill: A Look at Noble Rot

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Jackson, Ron. Wine Science Principles and Applications Plate 9.1 - Cluster of grapes at different stages of rot.

Jackson, Ron. Wine Science Principles and Applications Plate 9.1 – Cluster of grapes at different stages of rot.

The fungus Botrytis cinerea — a type of gray mold — is the kind that grows on the old berries in your fridge, but in the vineyards of Europe (and more recently some other wine-producing regions artificially infected, but more on that later) B. cinerea doesn’t always turn valuable fruit into a furry mush. Also known as noble rot, B. cinerea has the potential to positively change wine grapes, in the right conditions. Depending on a vineyard’s microclimate, infection can result in either gray rot, which essentially ruins the grapes, or noble rot, which leads to unique dessert wines such as the Tokaji Aszú of Hungary, the higher Prädikat wines of Germany, and the Sauternes of France (the most prized of which can fetch $750 a bottle!).

In a single vineyard there can be completely healthy grapes, grapes with gray rot, and grapes with noble rot, all in close proximity to each other. The required conditions for noble rot formation are incredibly narrow. Like with most fungi, humid conditions favor formation. However, alternating dry and rainy periods, particularly frequent morning fogs, are necessary for the formation of asexual conidia (spores). Therefore, noble rot seldom occurs in hot and dry areas, since sunny and windy conditions allow more water evaporation. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In New York City

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Henrik Egede Lassen/Alpha Film/Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme Global warming is already wreaking havoc on human civilization.

Henrik Egede Lassen/Alpha Film/Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme
Global warming is already wreaking havoc on human civilization.

The New Yorker interviews a former staff writer, now an activist, about an event today in New York City that looks worthy of attendance if you are in town. We have noted several of this fellow‘s earlier activities, and do not tire of doing more of the same. Click the image above to go to the original invitation in Rolling Stone in May:

On Sunday, tens of thousands of demonstrators are expected to join the People’s Climate March through midtown Manhattan; its Web site describes it as the “largest climate march in history.” In May, Bill McKibben wrote an article in Rolling Stone, “A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change,” which laid some of the groundwork for this weekend’s events. We spoke about the march with McKibben, one of its lead organizers, and a former New Yorker staff writer.

According to the Los Angeles Times, anywhere between a hundred thousand and four hundred thousand people are expected to come to New York City for the People’s Climate March. Can you tell us about how you, and others, came up with the idea for a large demonstration and how you turned it into what it is now?

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Pollinators And Diet

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From the current issue of Conservation online, a review of the latest science on one of our favorite topics:

SHOULD POLLINATOR RESEARCH FOCUS ON REGIONS WITH MALNUTRITION? September 19, 2014

Pollinators + plants = food. Right? The domesticated honeybee, along with a handful of wild bee species, is in decline. But 75 percent of the 115 major crop species grown around the world rely on pollinators to give us that food. This equation is woefully out of balance.

Pollinator-dependent crops make up only a fraction of total agricultural revenues, but that’s because the nine priciest crops, which together comprise half of global agriculture as measured by revenue, can become pollinated by wind, or can pollinate themselves. But the economic value of agriculture is only one way to understand the value of different crops. Another is the value of the different crops to human health and nutrition. Continue reading →

Animal Behavior: The Osa Peninsula

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On a recent trip to the Osa Peninsula for a couple of days, and one herpetologically-rich night, I found a number of the types of animals that make Costa Rica such a popular destination for wildlife-lovers. The Osa is home to about half the species that Costa Rica boasts, making it the most biodiverse spot in the country — or even the world. The density of fauna seen on any hike through the forest back up the statistics (2.5% of the earth’s biodiversity just on this little peninsula?!), and I was glad to be able to get some video of typical animal behavior during my time there. Continue reading →

Know Paul Piff

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It has been some time since we posted on the topic of altruism, but it is one of the words we come back to directly and indirectly nearly every day, one way or another. We watch out for our own stories to explain this phenomenon. Raxa Collective works in locations categorized as developing economies. Some among our ranks are from so-called developed economies, with among the highest per capita incomes in the world, while others among our ranks are from economies at the other end of the per capita income range.

A consensus has developed among those of us who have worked across a spectrum of countries, a consensus which we considered a bit of a paradox (and a completely unrealistic and unfair generalization, but still we noticed it this way), that poorer people do more surprisingly generous things considering that they would seem to have less with which to be generous.

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Roots and Seeds at Xandari

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Back in the beginning of July, James and I helped José Luis plant some Bourbon coffee seeds so that they would eventually become seedlings that could be put in bags to grow into saplings. Now, after months of watering and patience, many of the seedlings are finally beginning to emerge. As more and more of them germinate and create their shoots, we’ll be putting them into the bags with soil to wait another year before planting them in the ground at Xandari.

Plenty of other plants have been productive over the last couple months: Continue reading →

Floating Fences

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At Spice Harbour boats aren’t the only colorful item floating past the property on a daily basis. While the water hyacinth is lovely, it can also clog the water ways and make boating difficult to manage when it piles up along the edges and eddies of the harbour front.

We hired local fisherman to create a floating bamboo fence Continue reading →

A Night Walk in the Osa Peninsula

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I recently went on a night walk in the rainforest of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, looking for frogs, snakes, and other nocturnal animals with a great wildlife guide who knew the area well. Although we didn’t see any mammals or the famous deadly Bothrops asper viper known as the “terciopelo” in Spanish (velvet) and “fer-de-lance” in French (spearhead). We did, however, see numerous frog species and at least two snake species, although we could only identify the six or seven Cat-eyed Snakes we saw.

There were also some basilisk lizards getting bit by mosquitoes, a large spider similar to a tarantula, a dragonfly larva in the water, and plenty of frog eggs. At one point we turned off all our flashlights to try to find a glass frog (pictured below) and noticed some bioluminescent mushrooms, which were impossible to photograph in the dark and look pretty dull in the light. Although I’ve forgotten the names of the various frog species featured in the slideshow of the photos I was able to take below, I hope you enjoy Continue reading →

Birds Are Barometers, Among Other Things

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A recent study projects that the summer range of the Allen’s hummingbird will shrink by 90 percent by 2080. Photo by Loi Nguyen/Audubon Photography Awards

One more story related to the centenary mentioned here, this time with a podcast interview with  to accompany our previous post linking to his editorial in the New York Times:

It’s been 100 years since the last passenger pigeon died. Would we have been able to save the bird today? What is the state of bird conservation in North America? Gary Langham of the National Audubon Society and Ken Rosenberg from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology discuss which species are under threat and how climate change might affect birds in the future.

Giants Known And Unknown

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me 2 - CopyWe have posted a few times about awesome oceanic creatures, and their literary impacts, and lots of times about the heroes working to save whales in particular, so when this decade-old but still-fresh article on the giant squid we had missed came to our attention just now, we had to share it:

…Though oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth—the Pacific alone is bigger than all the continents put together—the underwater realm has remained largely invisible to human beings. For centuries, there was no way for scientists to peer into the depths, no telescope that could gaze into the abyss. (A pearl diver can venture down no more than a hundred feet.) Until the nineteenth century, most scientists assumed that the deepest parts of the ocean—where the temperature was frigid, the pressure intense, and the light minimal—contained no life. Continue reading →

Conquering Iceland’s Mountains: The Alpine Club (Part 3)

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“Turquoise Falls, Bruarfoss” © Jerome Berbigier

Continued from Part 2.

As it turned out, it was a British law student, William Lord Watts, who became the first man to truly answer Longman’s call and embark on some serious exploring. In the introduction to his book Across the Vatna Jökull; or, Scenes in Iceland; Being a Description of Hitherto Unknown Regions, Watts started by taking issue with the concerned British subject at home who saw the exploration of wilderness as a waste of “money, time, and labour,” or “utter folly,” explaining that everyone had a mania for something or other, and his own “may be to wander amongst unknown or unfrequented corners of the earth.” Calling for “a truce to critical stay-at-homes,” Watts advanced to the meat of his trip itself.

In his descriptions of his several expeditions, Watts usually employed a calm, scientific and lawyerly tone that make his bursts of romantic and athletic enthusiasm in certain scenes all the more exciting and believable. Nodding to his biggest audience, he also used some of the Continue reading →

Conquering Iceland’s Mountains: The Alpine Club (Part 2)

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Continued from Part 1.

If Longman’s unorthodox address is interesting as a sign of Iceland’s attractiveness to the middle-class British authentic-seeking traveller, the responses to his suggestions are even more so. In a May 18 article The Critic wrote a review of the Longman’s address that effectively summed up the perceived position of Iceland in the global context of travel and exploration. The author suggested that any adventurous Briton who had already “used up Ireland and Scotland” and “[did] not care to ascend Mont Blanc for the dozenth time” might turn to Iceland for their future travels, as it had spectacular scenery equal to Switzerland and critics were growing tired of “oft-repeated tales” in countries they knew intimately through so many books. The contributor continued by explaining that:

Aerial view of Iceland © Sarah Martinet

We do not ask the good-natured traveller to kill gorillas in Africa after Mr. Du Chaillu’s fashion, or hunt bisons on the American prairies with Mr. Grantley Berkeley. Our request is much more reasonable. Iceland may be reached by the expenditure of a single five-pound note: and in that uncockneyfied land a solitary Englishman may pay all his daily travelling expenses, including those which will be entailed on him by a retinue of three horses and a guide, for twenty shillings.

Continue reading →