Author Erika Szymanski

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Erika Szymanski
Science Writer
Erika Szymanski studies wine science dissemination at the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She holds Masters degrees in both microbiology and English rhetoric and composition and wants, someday, to help improve the structures through which scientists communicate with each other, industry, and the world. Erika was named 2012 Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year for her work on Palate Press.

Wine needs a Nordic Food Lab

Erika Szymanski
Features
5 min read
Wine needs a Nordic Food Lab. I’m not making a call for mealworm merlot or even necessarily for reclaiming ancient, lost grape varieties. I’m saying that wine needs a space for really off-the-wall research, done very well and in full view. If mealworm merlot just threw you for a loop

What do you really think of that wine? Ask your brain.

Erika Szymanski
Features
6 min read
Surely we've all met someone, or been the someone, who asks whether that expert really discerns purple peaches and cassis in that merlot-cabernet blend. Even if we trust in someone's sincerity, are they really feeling it or have they just convinced themselves? Then we layer the imprecisions of language on

Do “hand-picked” grapes mean better wine?

Erika Szymanski
Features
6 min read
Stanford linguistic professor Dr. Dan Jurafsky's recent book on The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu includes a perspicacious observation about high-class versus budget restaurant menus. Explicit adjectives about yumminess are pretty much the sole purview of the bottom lot. Red Lobster will offer you flaky cod fillets hand-dipped

134 year-old California wine research: Conclusions pending

Erika Szymanski
Features
6 min read
In 1880, Dr. Eugene Hilgard asked the California state legislature for $3000 to start a wine research program at the University of California, and he got it. His first start-up – the “California Agricultural Experiment Station,” now transmogrified into the University of California Davis's massive agricultural extension program – had