Something in the Water Episode 1: Bringing Water to the Table
Episode Description: In the first episode of Something in the Water, host Elena Berg interviews Michael Mascha, a founder of the Fine Water Society. Together, they introduce the concept of a water sommelier and the epicurean experiences that water has to offer. They discuss Michael’s journey in creating the Fine Water Society and the growth of the organization, the role that water sommeliers have to play in sustainability, and explain why water is not just water.
Episode Guest: Michael Mascha
Find more information about Michael Mascha and the Fine Water Society here.
More information about the episode and Something in the Water here.
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted by Elena Berg
Written and produced by Elena Berg and Clark Marchese
Audio Editing by Clark Marchese
Cover art by Sarah Glavan
Theme Music by Josef Salvat
Transcript:
[00:00:13.770] - Elena Berg
Hello everyone it’s Elena Berg, your host of something in the water, the podcast where we dive into the world of water, from luxury mineral springs to the challenges of access, environment and industry, for a deeper understanding of what we drink. I'm wondering if you even know how much water you drank today. Do you know where it came from? Do you know what's inside it apart from the hydrogens and the one oxygen? Well, if you don't, you're like most people, including myself, for about the first 90% of my life. My name is Elena Berg, and I'm a water sommelier. Over the last four years, I've been working with my academic colleagues and fellow water enthusiasts to learn more about our earth's freshwater sources. I've been really digging into the mineral water industry to try to understand the people behind the brands and the environmental impacts of single use plastic and the other materials we use. And I have been doing water tastings with different groups of people as well, to spread the word about water and its sources and the importance of protecting our earth's precious freshwater sources. So now, several years later, I thought it was time to spread the word even further and in a new way for me.
[00:01:31.330] - Elena Berg
So podcasting is this exciting new world that I think is a really wonderful way to communicate with people from all over the place. So that's why I'm starting this show, Something in the Water, to begin that discussion with you. Despite our lives depending on it, most of us don't spend too much time thinking about water and the important questions that come with it. Why should you care about water? What choices should you make about the water that you drink? Why do we even need to drink water in the first place? From an environmental perspective, is all bottled water bad? What should our various nations be doing to protect tap water and to build that infrastructure? How do we move forward when public trust in the tap is broken? Should we be putting water into a bottle of any kind ever? How can industry leaders help spread important information about the world's freshwater resources and how to save them? So that, I think, may be my greatest focus, looking at what these smaller producers, individual producers, can do to spread the word, to be a source of information that's valuable. Something in the Water is a ten-part miniseries that's going to address all of these questions with the goal of unpacking complex conversations and to help us understand them better.
[00:02:54.230] - Elena Berg
I got to talking with experts, scientists, small water producers, researchers , and also water sommeliers like me. I guess now might be a good time to tell you a little bit more about myself and what I do. My name is Elena Berg, and I'm an environmental scientist. And, yes, I did say water sommelier. This is kind of a unique combination. So let's start with one. A lot of you may not have known that water somaliers existed, but we do. A water sommelier is a lot like a wine sommelier, but just not with wine. We have expertise in the flavors and the qualities of different freshwater sources. Taste profiles for water are a lot more subtle than those for wine. But even still, they can tell you how water from a glacier may be different from a volcanic spring. So we, water sommeliers, are mainly interested in water from a natural source that comes straight from the earth, where we know exactly where it came from. The specific qualities of each source can influence water in all kinds of different ways. And this is the first time you'll hear me say this in the series, that not all water is the same.
[00:04:12.350] - Elena Berg
So all water has those hydrogens and oxygen, but beyond that, there's all kinds of other stuff that can be in the water that can cause it to taste different. So we're going to discuss the different kinds of water on this show, because this single source water is not the only kind of water out there to enjoy. We sommeliers love promoting tap water as well. Tap water from any source in places where it's safe to drink. The idea that you have to drink water from some particular source with particular characteristics is not at all the point of being a water sommelier. So what we want to do most of all is spread knowledge about water and help people to enjoy and appreciate the water that they're drinking. So, in any case, throughout this show, you'll learn how to better enjoy water, whether it comes from a tap, a can, or, yes, even, in some cases, a bottle. Okay, okay. I know what you're thinking. It's already 2024. We have, like, six more years to save the planet. Climate change is barrelling down upon us. How can you be telling us to enjoy bottled water at a time like this?
[00:05:24.070] - Elena Berg
Believe me, I get it. Another thing I should tell you about myself is that I'm actually an environmental science professor at the American University of Paris. Long before entering the water world, I spent many decades of my life conducting research on animal social behaviour, both in the wild and in the lab. I've worked with monkeys on Barbados, lemurs, Madagascar, a bunch of different species of birds all over the world, including the deserts of Israel, the tropical dry forests of Costa Rica. I've worked in the desert highlands of northern Mexico, and the Australian outback. Most recently, my students and I have been working with beetles in my small lab in Paris. So I've switched gears to working on lab systems instead. And right now, we're actually looking at the impact of climate change on beetle lives. And in addition, I'm building a small marine lab to look at how marine organisms are functioning. So maybe I'll make another podcast about all of that next. But the important bit is that my science background actually was a launching pad for my exploration into the whole world of fine bottled waters. So I recognized that the big companies like Coca Cola or Nestle, they might have an important part to play in bringing water to some people that wouldn't otherwise have access.
[00:06:55.090] - Elena Berg
That can be an important role to play. But for the most part, I won't be defending their actions on this show. In my environmental science class, we were discussing the bottled water industry and why single use plastic was so problematic. And as part of that discussion, I asked my students to do a blind taste test of popular bottled waters to see whether they could tell the difference between the different kinds of water. And this led me down this whole rabbit hole that I'm still exploring today. The important thing to know here is that I first came to the fine bottled world as a skeptic, unconvinced that there was really any place for bottled water on this planet. My first experiments with my students were essentially to show them that they couldn't tell the difference between tap water and all these other waters. But what I've realized is that, well, like I've said already, not all bottled water is the same. And this actually took me by surprise. I wasn't really thinking about that. It turns out that there's a whole world of small companies that are run by these really wonderful nerds who are just gaga about water.
[00:08:05.000] - Elena Berg
And many of these people are putting a lot of time and effort into figuring out how we can keep enjoying different waters while also honouring and protecting our natural resources. So, again, this is not what I came into this whole world expecting to find out, but it is where I am today. So we'll spend some time discussing why bottled water has become a symbol to represent anti-environmental behaviour. But the bottom line is that whether you bottled water or grow carrots or make clothes or teach kids or, yes, produce podcasts like this one, how you make and spend your money has an impact on the planet. And the journey that each of us goes on to reduce that impact will look different depending on who and where we are on this planet I'll talk to small water producers, or small water farmers, as I like to call them, all across the world, from India to Australia, Austria, South Africa, who bring water from a natural source to the market. We want to discuss sustainability of drinking water in their contexts. Before we get into the nitty gritty of business models and sustainability and origin stories of individual water producers, I think the best place to start with you is the place I started myself.
[00:09:28.790] - Elena Berg
So today we're going to have an introduction to the world of fine water. That's really the only way we'll convince you that not all water is the same. So to help me with this task, I could think of no better person to talk to than Michael Masha, who's the founder of the fine Water Society. So in case you haven't heard of the fine water Society, it's basically a club for mineral water producers and distributors, for waters that are unprocessed and bottled right at their source. So Michael also co runs a water sommelier training program that's called the Fine Water Academy. I had a really lovely conversation with Michael. We discussed why he started the fine water society in the first place and how it's grown over recent years. We talked about different kinds of water, the role that small water producers have in environmental stewardship, and a number of ways that we can turn water into a truly epicurean experience.
[00:10:36.330] - Elena Berg
Excellent. All right, we are recording.
[00:10:39.030] – Michael Mascha
Looks like we're recording. I got a message that we're recording.
[00:10:42.290] – Elena Berg
Yes.
[00:10:42.910] – Michael Mascha
Excellent.
[00:10:43.780] - Elena Berg
So today I want to talk a little bit about the epicurean context of water. And I have Michael Masha here with me today, who is one of the, I would say, the world's preeminent expert in water in fine dining.
[00:10:56.070] - Michael Mascha
Yeah. Thank you for having me. My name is Michael Marsha, and about 20 years ago, I had to stop drinking wine and alcohol, and I moved my epicurean curiosity for the wine I had and moved it towards water. And now, a little bit more than 20 years later, we're in the middle of almost like a movement that what is considered now part of a table culture. We have food on the table, we have wine on the table, and now we also have water on the table.
[00:11:26.630] - Elena Berg
What prompted that shift? Why did you want to move your energies into water instead?
[00:11:31.870] - Michael Mascha
I didn't want to move the emphasis. It was my cardiologist that told me that I cannot drink wine anymore. And it was my wife that made me understand that this is an important decision. And she said, it's only difficult if you have a choice, but you don't have a choice. So it cannot be difficult. So I moved away from the wine, but there was immediately this big hole on the table. Imagine your friends drinking wine. They have the nice stemware from Riedel, the hand blown glasses, and in a restaurant, you have a tumbler, and then you have to toast with this glass. And the other people have this soft, ringing voice of fine glass touching each other. And then you have this clunk sound when you touch with your glass. And I said, we need to change something. I want to be part of that culture, and I want to have something to talk about. And this is when I shifted away from the wine and focused on the water.
[00:12:22.910] - Elena Berg
How did you then become influential in building this whole world now that focuses on mineral water?
[00:12:32.110] - Michael Mascha
Yeah. So number one is, it's almost like probably with many people, it's the personal discovery of a new world. This was number one. And I discovered that, that you can have the same experiences with water. So once you've discovered this new world, you want to share it. So you start sharing it with your friends over the table. And we did that for a couple of years, but my background was also in IT and online technology. So we have this beautiful thing called the World Wide Web, and lately, many social media outlets. And that, of course, allows you to immediately have a following on a global scale that would not have been possible just ten years before. Ten years before, this would have been a small printed newsletter somewhere that would have gone nowhere. But with the amplification of being able to do this on the World Wide Web in an online context, you suddenly become global.
[00:13:28.970] – Elena Berg
Okay, just to give you guys a bit of context, the fine water society works with over 100 companies from all over the world that produce premium water brands. The society was founded in 2008 and hosts the annual Taste and Design Awards, which is an international mineral water competition.
[00:13:45.930] - Michael Mascha
It's really, really fascinating to see the difference between one small company struggling and 100 companies pulling together their efforts. We have this global corporations. We all know them. It's the Danone, the Nestle's, the Coca Cola's, the Pepsis. They have marketing power. They have some of the waters, and they push their waters into all the restaurants. And it's very hard for the small brands to break through. So, we decided to maybe it helps if we bring all the small brands together and elevate the whole category together. And this is what the fine water society is doing now.
[00:14:23.350] – Elena Berg
Can you talk a little more about how you see the landscape shifting?
[00:14:27.670] – Michael Masha
Let's go back 1015 years. San Pellegrino Pana were premium waters Perrier was a super-premium water. Those were the waters. Those were the big brands. There was nothing else around. And move forward to now, we have trained many water sommeliers around the world. They do water menus. None of the sommeliers would put a Perrier would put San Pellegrino or a Pana on a water menu, because they're just commodity waters. I mean, they're great waters. There's nothing wrong with them. They're just so pervasive. So we have made a significant impact in the category by putting the small brands on the pedestal and pushing down the commodity brands. And they are trying very hard with huge marketing powers to gain and maintain momentum in the market space. But they're losing left and right.
[00:15:20.790] – Elena Berg
So a water menu may be a new term. For some of us.
[00:15:24.490] - Elena Berg
It's the same concept as a wine.
[00:15:26.270] – Elean Berg
Menu, but for natural mineral waters with various interesting qualities. You might include waters with lots of minerals or very few or have a section on carbonated waters or still ones. Maybe your menu is broken down by country or by type of source. So, all of these will be waters from a very particular location and a source, and generally not the municipal water that comes out of your tap, or the restaurant's tap, for that matter. Although sometimes tap water is listed on the menu.
[00:16:01.490] - Elena Berg
So I think about the Pen and Teller sketch from 2003, right, where they did a whole spoof on the idea of the water sommelier, the idea of a water menu. And now here we are in 2023. And that's no longer a joke, right? That skit doesn't have the same resonance that it did.
[00:16:24.280] – Elena Berg
So in this sketch. And I'll link a clip in the show notes. Restaurant goers are provided with a number of waters to compare, but they all come from a garden hose. Well, guess we'll get Ladu Robinet.
[00:16:44.370] – Elena Berg
Obviously, it's funny because it's actually all the same water. And to add insult to injury, the water is coming out of a common garden hose. But in fact, in real life, there are many different flavor profiles of mineral water. The flavor profiles for water aren't nearly as varied as for wine, but it's not that far-fetched anymore to put them into a menu. So maybe we should break down what a mineral water actually is. So how it's defined depends on what part of the world you're from. Confusing.
[00:17:17.850] - Elena Berg
But in Europe, at least, for a water to be called a mineral water, it has to come from a single natural source without being tampered with. After it's taken out of the ground. The only thing you can do to a mineral water is to add carbonation if you want to. And many mineral water companies offer a still and a sparkling version of the same water. Mineral waters can differ from each other in many, many ways.
[00:17:44.520] - Elena Berg
So in the amount, in types of minerals that are inside the water, such as calcium or magnesium or silica, in the amount or type of carbonation, differences in pH, et cetera. To anyone who is skeptical about waters tasting all that different, I was once you, and now I'm not. Just stick with us a bit and you'll see. Stick around to the end of the credits and I'll give some examples of different waters to try, and I'll explain what's inside them that makes them taste so different.
[00:18:14.350] - Michael Mascha
Mineral water is a very local term. It means different things in different places. The distinction I like to draw is between processed and natural water. I think that's, for me, the big distinction. Processed water is usually filtered tap water. There's a factory sitting in the middle of your city. Tap water runs into the factory, the water gets filtered, a couple of minerals are thrown in, it's filtered into a bottle, and it's considered to be very smart to drink this water. Of course, it's not very smart, because you're drinking basically the same tap water that you have in your tap, only that it's filled in a plastic bottle and you're contributing significantly to all the plastic waste. So it's a total wasteful enterprise. And unfortunately, depending on where you are, in the US, for example, about 50% of the water sold in supermarket and grocery stores is this processed water in plastic bottles. Don't forget, there's nothing wrong with tap water. If there's nothing wrong with your tap water, it really depends on your location. There are places where there's something really wrong with your tap water, but hopefully you're already aware of that.
[00:19:21.510] – Elena Berg
Yes. So tap water is a big part of people's lives, as it should be. Certainly, in areas where there's good water, sanitation and health. In Europe and in the US, for example, most people drink most of their water straight from the tap or maybe using a simple filter. We do have some examples of tap water going really, really wrong and the trust that is lost in that process. And we'll talk more about that in a later episode. But because tap water is so accessible and safe for many of us, the idea of water in a bottle raises alarm bells.
[00:19:53.050] - Elena Berg
So one of the reasons why I've gotten really interested in this world as you know, is because I come at this from an environmental perspective. Originally, when I started my training, I didn't really understand why water wasn't just water. I didn't have much education about water. And so one of the things I became interested in is everybody I have met in that world, or almost everybody, has a substantial interest in protecting the environment. So do you see a role, a particular role that these individuals can play in helping to increase general knowledge about water, to help people get interested in this problem in general? Because, as we know, with global climate change, access to water is going to become increasingly problematic. It's going to become more and more important that people understand what's going on with water and how to address these problems. So do you see a connection between the work you're doing to elevate these small water farmers and some of these global problems that we're all trying to solve?
[00:21:00.360] – Michael Masha
I think what the small water farmers do, what we are doing, we give value to water. And the second we give value to water, we make people realize water is not just water. I give value to the water, and I make you think about water. But I cannot do everything for you. I can just make you aware of the problem, but then you have to do something about the problem. And I think that's what we, as water sommeliers do. That's what you're doing. What I'm doing is we elevate water away from this commodity that no one thinks about, and we're putting it right in the center of your thought, because water is important
[00:21:34.510] – Elena Berg
To that point, though, even though these producers have a business model that requires them to remove this resource from the ground, their livelihood also depends on keeping that source healthy year after year. So aside from hopefully making money, which for many of them is an uphill battle, they're doing two things. First, the act of putting this water into a special bottle gives symbolic value to that water and sends the message that not all water tastes the same. And second, they're hopefully doing what they can to protect that source and by extension, the ecosystems surrounding the source. We'll delve into the specifics of that when we actually talk to these people in later episodes. But what I want to talk to you about for the remainder of the interview is water in an epicurean context. So how we relate to water aesthetically, as part of our Dining experience, is.
[00:22:28.210] - Elena Berg
There anything you want to say about kind of what you've discovered about how we perceive different tastes?
[00:22:34.860] – Michael Mascha
Taste is very simple. It's the perception we have when we put something in the mouse, and we have taste buds. We have about 10,000 taste buds on our tongue, and we have detectors for sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. They're fairly evenly distributed. Just as a side note, the whole idea of the ritual tongue map is total chunk science. The taste buds are fairly evenly distributed, and this is where taste comes. So taste is the input from our taste buds. And we sometimes use the word interchangeable with the word flavor. But I think flavor is something different. Flavor is not in your food. Flavor is in your brain. Flavor is the computation of the inputs, like taste, smell, and mouthfeel in your brain. So this is kind of the narrow and kind of old definition. Gastrophysics is kind of a fairly new discipline, has really expanded the definition of flavor and includes, of course, the taste, the smell, the texture, but also sound, color, vision, shapes, and the atmosphere in which you consume. And it creates this cross-modal interaction between different inputs that actually creates the flavor for us. But I would like to use in the future, like to move water also in that direction and move just away from the narrow.
[00:23:57.840] - Michael Mascha
This tastes different than this one. This has a different flavor to include more experiences around water.
[00:24:03.940] - Elena Berg
So what do you mean by experiences?
[00:24:05.880] - Michael Mascha
So, experiences means that it's not only the taste that you experience with the water thick sound, right. When you open a bottle of sparkling water, you have that beautiful sound of the bubbles. And if you hold the bottle very far away from, you don't hear it. So if you see me open a bottle of sparkling water, I hold it very close to my ear, and I'm listening to the bubbles. I pour it in the glass, and I put the glass closer to my ear, and I want to hear the bubbles . That sound can significantly influence your experience of the water. We know it can do that with the food. Their very famous presentation, the Fed duck, a famous restaurant from Heston Blumenthal outside of London. They have a dish which consists of many seafood items that are very artistic. Arranged on your plate and below the plate is a small sound player, and it plays the sound of the ocean while you eat the food. And it was a sensation when it came up, because people experience, suddenly that sound has a significant influence on how you experience the food. Your food tastes different. This is the cross modal influence.
[00:25:14.790] - Michael Mascha
You think it tastes different, it tastes the same, because the taste influence is the same, but you have a cross modal influence from the sound, and suddenly your experience is very different. And this becoming famous now, and it's called sound seasoning. So chefs now season their food with sound. And I want to move water into the same direction, making people aware that water can have different experiences, not only from the taste, but also from other things around it, from textures, from sound, from smell, and so forth.
[00:25:49.290] - Elena Berg
Listening to you talk about this, it brings up an interesting tension to me between the sort of scientific desire to have these blind taste tests and to isolate very particular elements and take all of those other elements away so that you're just thinking about. In this case, I guess it would be, I mean, taste without the combination, with all the other sensations that might flow into flavor. In the wine world, there's been a similar desire, right? To isolate and create rankings of better and worse flavor profiles, to kind of codify exactly what different things should taste like, different flavor profiles. And what that does is it tries to eliminate experience from that ranking system. And what you're saying is that, in fact, all of those experiences are, of course , vital to how we appreciate and understand and integrate memories about the water we're drinking, the wine we're drinking, whatever.
[00:26:46.610] - Elena Berg
Do you have any other examples of how senses other than taste can enhance our experience?
[00:26:51.970] - Michael Mascha
Let's quickly run through this smell. Right, so you think water doesn't smell? Usually it doesn't, but it does. Especially if you go into higher mineral water. If you drink heroi or radensko or something and you hold your nose to it, of course it doesn't smell across the table. You have to hold the glass to your nose. You will have a smell experience. Then we talked about the sound, and now it gets really interesting. If you move to color, does color have taste? And everyone would say, no, of course color doesn't have taste. But does color influence your taste? Yes, absolutely. Significantly. There's a famous dish from chef Yusuf Yusuf in London at kitchen theory. You get three spoons in front of you. One is white, the other one is brown, one is green, and one is red. And they come in no particular order. And the instruction for the guest is to start with the salty one, then the bitter one, then the sour one, and then the sweet one. And people, for the first moment, are confused. But 70% of the people get the order right because we associated white with salty, the brown with bitterness, green with sour, and red with sweet.
[00:27:59.870] - Michael Mascha
And people using this in the kitchen. But I think we should also be using this with water. You want to make your water experience a little bit more sweeter? Maybe a red bottle would be more useful than putting it in a white bottle.
[00:28:13.170] - Elena Berg
I really love this idea, actually, of embracing the way that water and experience are connected. Again, the parallels to wine are clear, right? Where if you taste a wine in a particular vineyard, in the right moment of your life, it might taste absolutely delicious. And if you have that exact same wine on a rainy day when you're feeling grumpy, you may have a totally different experience of that wine.
[00:28:40.150] – Elena Berg
The wine world is a lot more formalized than the water world. They have a whole vocabulary to break down the specific qualities of the wine's taste, but experiences are harder to define. I wonder if creating a lexicon or a vocabulary for water might work the same way as it does for wine.
[00:28:58.440] – Michael Mascha
So there's a classic example of a wine tasting in Spain. Tasting spanish wines professional water sommelis. They're sitting on the same table opposite each other, dark black glasses, and they drink blind tasting wine. One group of people has a piece of soft silk clothes in front of them. The other group has some pieces of very fine sandpaper in front of them. And the instruction is, with one hand, touch the material in front of you. With the other hand, taste the wine and do a ratings. Professional wine somiles. Same thing, same wine. The ratings are very different. The people that touched the velvet ranked the wine much sweeter, had less tannins, more pleasant and less acidity than the same group of people sitting opposite to them that were touching the sandpaper. They rated it exactly in the opposite way. So the idea that you find words for wine alone, for me, goes out of the door with this thing here, because what are the other components around it?
[00:30:22.050] - Elena Berg
Yeah, I think you bring up an important point, which is that in the wine world, there's a tendency to identify whether a wine is better or worse than another one. And part of that may be all of the steps that go between planting your vine and having this product at the end, whereas with water, you're really pasting the raw substance that's come out of the ground. There isn't really any doctoring of that that you're supposed to be doing, aside from maybe adding that carbonation. So maybe this is one difference, is that in the wine world, there may be more motivation to try to identify the role that that winemaker is playing in taking this raw ingredient and turning it into the finished product, whereas we're evaluating essentially what Mother Nature has produced without any influence on our part whatsoever. So it becomes harder then to identify what's a better or worse water. As long as there aren't contaminants in that water, as long as the waters don't have harmful elements in them. Carcinogens or anything like that. Heavy metals, they're all equally wonderful. They're just very different. So moving to talk more about experience may make more sense.
[00:31:45.380] - Elena Berg
And moving away from this ranking that's done blindly, I think the reason why water sommeliers have done that is to provide that parallel between wine and water. It's useful to say, hey, wine has flavor, so does water. So it's brought water to the table. But actually, what we're trying to do with water is really different than what we might be trying to do with wine. And maybe it's okay to carve a really separate path.
[00:32:16.170] – Michael Mascha
Absolutely. I'm very much for this independent path, and I think the absolute key is what you said here is that wine is made and what is given to us. So it's a very different product. I'm very much in favor for carving out our own way also, because right now we only talked about drinking water. Right?
[00:32:43.250] – Elena Berg
Yeah. I can see how it's tempting to focus just on the waters themselves and how they're different from each other, rather than considering water as an ingredient in other things and how it can affect the flavors in a recipe. But I love the attention you're trying to place on how water can be used to craft an experience, and I hope it at least gets people thinking about water in a slightly different way. I think in the years to come, understanding the value of water in all its dimensions will be really important, because these fine waters come straight from the ground, from natural sources that need to be protected, both for the fun we can have with it, but also in recognition of our most basic human need. Well, thank you, Michael, for taking the time to talk to us today and for the shift that you've set off with the fine water society.
[00:33:35.970] - Elena Berg
This was a really thought provoking conversation for me. It should be intuitive to us that lots of things affect how we taste and perceive flavors. There's a lot of science around this, and gastrophysics is this booming field. But I'm kind of on the fence about whether the water world should go the kind of experience route or if it should instead focus on developing a formal lexicon like we already have for wine. Would a better vocabulary give more legitimacy to water? Maybe in the end, we need both.
[00:34:21.550] – Elena Berg
Thank you for listening to the first episode of something in the water. Please join us back here, wherever you're listening to this next week, where we'll address the plastic elephant in the room. We talked to Malia Elder, my old student, and an anti plastic activist about the social justice implications of plastic production, as well as Dr. Sherry Mason, a plastics researcher, to discuss plastic content found in both bottled water and, unfortunately, in our taps. I'm your host, Elena Burke. This podcast was produced and written by myself and Clark Marchese. This episode's guest was Michael Masha, and we've put some information about him in our show notes. This is a Pine Forest Media production, and full transcripts can be found@pineforestpods.com. The music you're listening to was produced by Joseph Salvat, my friend and future guest on the show. Cover art was made by Sarah Glavin, and the show was edited by Clark Marches. Finally, thank you to the American University of Paris for making this podcast possible. If you feel called, writing a review and giving us a five-star rating is the best thing you can do to help us out so we can make more sciency podcasts like this in the future. This is my first audio endeavor as a water sommelier, but as a scientist, we've got a lot more to cover than just water.
[00:35:50.430] – Elena Berg
All right, for those of you that have made it this far with us, as promised, I have some water wrecks for you. Let's start with french waters, which is my area of specialty, and one of my favorites is called Velleminfroy. V-E-L-L-E-M-I-N-F-R-O-Y. It's very high in minerals, but it isn't very salty, which is really rare since most high mineral waters have a lot of sodium. So it's got a really velvety rich flavor without that salt pinch. I like to enjoy Velmon foie, either on its own to enjoy its complexity, or it can be paired with a meal instead of or alongside a bolder red wine. Another water that's really fun for its history is called Chateldon. C-H-A-T-E-L-D-O-N. This brand was established in 1650 and was Louis XIV's favorite. You can find it in Parisian wine shops sometimes or in the traditional old restaurants. It comes from volcanic soils in Auvergne, and it's naturally carbonated, which is really rare. I hope you enjoy these two. If you do or if you don't, check out our website, pineforestpods.com for more information about water and about the show. Okay, bye bye for now.
