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Awakenings Chapter 5: Focusings, Page 5

“Fitness is relative and I think I used to be fit”, Ed said, laughing.

They both put on their helmets and climbed onto their bikes.  Pauline didn’t mention that she was wearing a heart rate monitor or that her heart rate did not exceed 100 beats per minute in the first few minutes as they took off.  They chatted a while riding until Ed needed every bit of energy just to breath.

 

Joe had returned to the winery office with his folder of photographs of the notes and documents from the wine tunnel.  The meeting with Rick Hadley and Simone had put his mind into overload.  This was so much information.  At least Simone and Rick did not have a clue as to the context of the information.  Was his Great Grandfather some kind of scholar?  Who was he, really?

Joe had just started to prepare to surf the web to search out information on this new stuff when the phone rang.

“Gamboro Winery, may I help you?”

“Hi Joe, this is Rodger.  I have finished the analysis of those crystals.”

“What did you find?”

“Just the scopolamine and atropine.  I think that I was able to get somewhat past the interfering compounds to quantify the amounts.  I don’t think that there was a lot, but it is pretty difficult to really estimate the concentrations in the liquid from crystals coating the inside of the glass.”

“Well thank you for looking at this stuff.”

“No problem, thank you for the library wines.  There is one thing that is puzzling though.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t understand the chemistry of how the wine crystallized as a coating all along the inside of the glass.  The wine should have been without oxygen in the bottle, so maybe pouring it into the glass changed the oxidation state of the crystal compounds in solution, causing them to precipitate out.  I’ve never seen anything like it in wine.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know.  I will work on trying to figure out what the full chemical makeup of those crystals is.  It really would be helpful to have some of the wine to analyze.”

Joe didn’t respond to the last part of Roger’s statement. “Well thank you very much for looking at the crystals.  By the way, we will be at the wine show At Jack London Square on Saturday.”

“Really.  Maybe my family and I will catch the train in Sacramento and make a day of it.”

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