So I received the most recent issue of the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture in the mail last night. Flipping through the articles and research notes and speed reading to find the juicy stuff, I usually just skip to the conclusions and only back-read when I find something particularly interesting. Thats exactly what happened last night when one particular paper caught my eye.
Titled Functional Analyses of the Malolactic Wine Yeast ML01, John Husnik (a PhD student at the University of British Columbia) et al test and analyse a new GMO yeast that performs malolactic fermentation at the same time as primary fermentation. Practically speaking ML01 eliminates the annoying problem of stuck MLFs (MILFs!), produces less volitile acidity, and was even shown to increse color extraction in Cabernet. Kind of a triple wammy of coolness for wine geeks.
There’s always a caveat, of course. GMO is a hot button issue and people have strong feelings about it, so I’m not even sure if these advantages are going to promote a widespread adoption of GMO yeasts - especially if wine labeling laws end up changing.
But all of this is really secondary to the killer citation I stumbled upon when reading the intro. Nearly spit out my beer when I saw it.
Ah yes. The estimable E. Fuck, whose seminal research on NAD-dependent malic enzymes are known to man and child. Yeah, not so much. At least not to English speaking academics, since E. Fuck’s paper is available exclusively in German.
Kudos to Husnik for slipping that citation in there, which has to be the culmination of a long held dream to get some ripe profanity into a peer reviewed journal. His friends should all buy him a beer. It ’s well deserved.
Cheers, John. You’re a rock star.
Very funny! I’ll have to look that one up. To bad I haven’t had to cite that article yet, but there is still time!
ibid
I can’t believe that!
It sounds like “F*^@ it all”
I am curious if this is a REAL researcher?
I still need to figure out if “Redzepovic” sounds like some other profanity or constituse another tongue in cheek pun.
Greg,
Oh man you’ve got to do it. My eternal respect if you can slip in it.
El Jefe,
Your Kung Fu is clearly much stronger than mine. In one word you’ve produced more comedic value than I was able to in a few hundred.
/prostrating myself
I’m not worthy!
Arthur,
I feel like I should have waited till today to post this because it would have made a great faux April Fools joke. The best part is that this is completely true. There really is/was a E. fuck who wote about NAD-dependent (Nad, heh) malic enzymes.
I think we all have wanted to cite Fuck et al once or twice in our lives, Husnik just got to do it in a peer reviewed journal!
Josh - if not for your few hundred, I would not have had the ultimate OMFG rush of knowing exactly the perfect comment for this post. I’ll be Tom to your Dick any day!
Um, so to speak…
Hey Josh, hilarious post. It’s not every day that you get to put something like that on your webpage and say, “no, seriously, that’s the dude’s REAL name!”
Imagine the beatings that poor guy got as a kid.
–R