• Favorite Wine Link: Fun with Grapes
• Administrivia
It's Friday, and we've been serious enough all week. Let's take a break, surf out on the Web, and have some FUN WITH GRAPES.
This may seem only tangentially wine-related, but remember, you can't make wine without grapes. So, for the child within us all, the simple, non-commercial Fun with Grapes Website offers a classic if tongue-in-cheek Case Study, written in 1994 and still presented in that retro Mosaic 1.0 browser style by Patrick R. Michaud.
Here's Michaud's Abstract, with a Capital A: "Using only cheap, readily-available equipment, you can create a spectacular light show in the comfort of your very own kitchen, providing hours (minutes?) of fun and excitement for your family, friends, and pets! Ordinary grapes, when properly prepared and microwaved, spark impressively in an extremely entertaining manner."
He adds, with straight face: "We have made an important new discovery in the field of culinary entertainment. Properly prepared, the common seedless grape can be made to combust spectacularly when subjected to a short (5-10 second) duration of microwaves."
Grape combustion is a safe and inexpensive hobby, he says, requiring only a few grapes, a knife, a microwave-safe plate and a microwave oven. As a result of the simple technical procedure, he observes, "the effect of the microwaves on the sliced grapes produced an extremely satisfying flare and associated sparks."
We'll spare you the details, but if you've got to have more, you'll find the full story, er, Case Study - with pictures - at http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/~pmichaud/grape/
See you Monday!
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All the wine-tasting reports posted here are consumer-oriented. In order to maintain objectivity and avoid conflicts of interest, I purchase all the wines I rate at my own expense in retail stores and accept no samples, gifts or other gratuities from the wine industry.
Friday, Feb. 22, 2002
Copyright 2002 by Robin Garr. All rights reserved.
