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it must have been the observation of what happened to such damaged grapes that led to the invention of wine. The first microbiological step in proper winemaking involves the controlled fermentation of grape must with yeast. In this, the sugars in the grape—glucose and fructose, together sometimes with added cane or beet sugar—are converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide. It is the carbon dioxide that bubbles off. In larger wineries, the yeasts are more likely nowadays to be commercially available, specially selected strains than to be natural yeasts. Having said that, in most small estates in Europe winemakers rely on the long-established natural yeasts that inhabit vineyards and wineries to get the fermentation going. Indeed, many of the greatest wines in a number of countries are made using natural (sometimes called “wild”) yeasts.

The next microbiological step in winemaking is malolactic fermentation, used in the making of most red wines and of many white ones. This depends on Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc, and/or Pediococcus bacteria, and converts malic acid, which is harsh-tasting and found in apples, into less harsh lactic acid and carbon dioxide (which bubbles off).

The main bacterium that mars wine is Acetobacter. If this bacterium is present, and also oxygen from the atmosphere, the alcohol is converted into acetic acid (the main ingredient, apart from water, in vinegar) and ethyl acetate (which is what one smells in nail polish remover). Some of these compounds occur in all wines, and indeed, their level may contribute to the overall characteristic of the wine (the famous Lebanese wine Château Musar is an example of this). However, at higher levels, these compounds (known as volatile acidity, or VA) are undeniably a fault. Modern winemakers take considerable care to exclude oxygen and/or to kill Acetobacter.

Finally, one must not forget the fungus that, in the presence of chlorine, acts on cork in such a way as to ruin the bottle of wine on which the cork is used. Bottles of wine destroyed by this microorganism are only too frequently opened by the regular wine drinker.

What is it in port that gives you gout?

CAUSE AND EFFECT are tricky bedfellows, and we are given to getting them wrong, so much so that the commonest error even has its own special Latin tag: post hoc, ergo propter hoc—literally “after that, therefore because of that,” or in other words, the assumption that because B followed A, A must have caused B.

One of the most fascinating examples of post hoc involves all those legends about zombies and the Undead and vampires and Nosferatu. What happens, you see, is that …

But no. That’s not a tale for this book. Another example, though—which certainly is in our brief—is the link between wine (especially port) and gout, which just may be wrong, though close.

There are some afflictions that will never be dignified. The pallid figure wasting elegantly on the chaise longue from consumption has a strange glamour. The migraine sufferer, too fraught even to groan in her darkened room, arouses universal sympathy. But contract hemorrhoids, for example, or an ingrown toenail, or a boil on the backside, and you find yourself somehow diminished, an instant object of slapstick fun.

The sufferer from gout is in a similar position. Depictions of him in woodcuts and cartoons show him (for it is invariably a him) seated with a heavily bandaged foot on a cushion; the foot may be depicted as being in flames, gnawed by demons, stabbed with knives, or otherwise tortured. The simplest, and in its way most affecting, example is on the title page of The Praise of Gout by Pirck heimer, published in London in 1617: it shows a profoundly saddened man, bandaged foot on a footstool, stick in hand, being examined by a tall-hatted physician, one hand raised in admonition, the other palpating the gouty leg. From the patient’s mouth issues a speech scroll. He is uttering one word and one word only: “Oh.”

You can see the picture, and many others, in Porter and Rousseau’s Gout: The Patrician Malady. For a disease—or, rather,