Why does wine taste good?
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2022
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this special Christmas episode, Brian Cox and Robin Ince visit the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide to find out what science can teach us about wine. They are joined by stand-up comedian Tim Minchin, Nobel Prize winner and vineyard owner Brian Schmidt, flavour chemist Mango Parker and sensory and consumer scientist Patricia Williamson. The panel are put through their paces as they sample a variety of wines, learning the hard way that the majority of wine’s flavour isn’t down to molecular chemistry but instead the holistic experience of wine drinking: the perceived price, mood in the room and even the weight of the bottle.
Producer: Caroline Steel Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | It's Christmas! |
| 0:06.6 | Actually, you can hear. |
| 0:08.1 | Yeah, it's never sounded more Christmasy than it does on the Infinite Monkey Cage today. |
| 0:12.6 | Yeah, well it's raining, isn't it? |
| 0:14.0 | Yeah, it is raining. |
| 0:15.0 | But anyway, it's probably not Christmas actually because it's unlikely the majority of the |
| 0:18.1 | audience are listening to this at Christmas because it can be downloaded anytime, |
| 0:21.0 | so it's not actually a good introduction. |
| 0:22.7 | Okay, fair enough, it's Christmas unless you're listening to this episode with Peter in June, |
| 0:27.2 | in which case it's Summer Soul Stairs or it's Witson or it's Easter or it's Tuesday or it's |
| 0:32.2 | today they put that man in the Wicker Man and sacrifice him to ensure a good harvest of the crops. |
| 0:37.2 | Anyway, I'm Robin Hents. |
| 0:38.5 | Hello, I'm Brian Cox and this is the Infinite Monkey Barrel. |
| 0:41.3 | Thank you very much. |
| 0:42.6 | So this is kind of the Christmas episode. |
| 0:44.5 | Well, we're doing it as a Christmas episode. |
| 0:46.4 | You listen to it however you want, but what we did because it's kind of the last episode of this |
| 0:50.6 | series as well is we thought we would say to Brian like the last day of school, |
| 0:54.6 | what would you like to do monkey cage bat? |
| 0:57.1 | You can do anything at all, it's free time and I thought it would be the normal. |
| 1:00.0 | Oh, can we do quantum entanglement? |
... |
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