Talk:Balsamic vinegar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Food Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
High This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

Content from another version of this article, currently available (with history) at Talk:Balsamic vinegar/Temp, was used in the preparation of this article.

I have replaced this page with a copyright violation notice. It is difficult for me to judge the origin of this page, but it was originally posted in July 2004 by User:Alien life form, who was only active for a few days in that month. The "history" section is verbatim the same as content on at least four other websites:

I verified that the first one has been up since 2002 (via archive.org), so these predate the Wikipedia entry. It looks suspiciously like this is a commercial description, perhaps from some balsamic vinegar trade association, which is used by various vendors of balsamic vinegar. In any event it looks like it was swiped illegally, so the whole article as contributed by this user should probably be rewritten from scratch. NTK 07:52, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] O, brave new copyright world

Greetings.

I luv being accused of illegal behavior, so I will point you to the following everyhting2 writeup

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1097267

(which, as you will note, was authored by me in July 2001). In said article, the history section was adapted from www.balsamicvinegar.com, whose content I and my colleagues created on behalf of a customer a year before (roughly). No copyright was contemplated - quite obviously - on such a trivial account of the recorded history of the stuff. The domain then changed hands, its content was rewritten, etc. so I actually thought that the stuff I wrote was mine to use but, hey, we do mistakes. If traceable at all, that must be the original source of the material that I shamelessly "swiped".

That writeup and some other material I had from then - a part from my personal experience - have been the basis for the article of the wikipedia. To which I return to find out it was really a swipe. Oh, well - I have written compositions in high school for which I care more deeply than that article, and it looks that wikipedia will be balsamic-vinegar-less after all (I'm not going to invest any time in rewriting the thing, next please).

I do find utterly ridiculous, though, the way in which copyright perception and policing (way way before legislation) are getting in the way of sharing rather flat and flavorless factual accounts.

But that ridiculous is only a pale reflection of that which emanates from accounts of such trivia that are peppered with words like "illegal, suspicious, swipe, was active just a few days".

One would think we're killing the Romanoffs, here, rather than engaging in highly onanistic and irrelevant intellectual self play. Of which I had enough.

Alien Life Form 03:19, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

P.S. All of othe above strictly ©. Careful what you quote - especially "onanistic".

Hello. Since you seem to be coming in to Wikipedia from everything2—which has mostly had a lax policy on this sort of thing, perhaps you're not familiar with how things are done here. If you are posting content that appears elsewhere or that was not created especially for wikipedia, you should cite it in the article or at least post a note about it in the talk page, stating that you are the copyright-holder or showing evidence that it is public-domain or otherwise GFDL-compatible. (Note that your sarcastic copyright notice is not applicable, since by submitting new content to Wikipedia you are agreeing to GFDL-license your content.) I followed standard Wikipedia procedure in researching the copyright status of your article. In any case it seems like I was right after all, in that intentionally or not this article belongs to the client whom you created this article. There's no need to be so touchy, all you needed to do was post an explanation here. I would like to welcome your future contributions to Wikipedia but suggest that you be more carefully about sourcing and citing your contributions and otherwise following accepted practices, since unlike everything2, articles in Wikipedia are not individual pieces, but collaboratively edited parts of a larger work. NTK 07:25, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)


[edit] External Link - Advertisement?

One of the external links was:

This links directly to an online shopping site. It's not very informative, except to demonstrate that balsamic vinegar is indeed quite expensive. Looks like it's to draw traffic to this particular product selection. I can't say I have a good replacement link, but I removed this one pending any disagreement, if any. Clarkcol 03:43, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

The text that accompanied the link was terrible, but the link itself is helpful in showing a variety of products and their high prices. I support retaining it for that purpose. Badagnani 03:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
That purpose does not justify including a link to a selling site. Leave it out. Dicklyon 05:07, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Whatever you believe, please don't present it as a command. What you meant to say, I think, was "I think we should leave it out." Your opinion is no more or less valuable than any others of ours. Badagnani 05:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
You may interpret my imperative voice as my opinion, yes, which is all it is. My opinion is "leave it out". But save your lecture. (that's my opinion, too; you don't have to obey) Dicklyon 05:55, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Factually incorrect?

I believe the sources cited in this article are incorrect. They currently suggest that the red, silver and gold label certification processes are related to age. The process used to create the vinegars doesn't lend itself to giving a specific age, as the barrells of vinegars are never fully emptied, but blended with each other as the aging process takes place. The colors indicate quality, with red being acceptable, silver being better and gold being the best possible quality. I cannot find a source for this online, however it is listed in a book that comes with the graded vinegars from the consortium in Reggio Emilia. Steeltoe 18:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Balsamic - Balsam

There is no reference made to the origin of the term 'Balsamic'. Can anyone enlighten as to which 'Balsam' the term relates?? 82.40.174.31 01:34, 31 May 2007 (UTC)dr_banishcola

The vinegar was apparently first written about in the 11th century, when the Crusades began; there are some Middle Eastern gums that were prized as medicines in the Middle Ages, such as Balsam of Mecca or Balm of Gilead, so the Medieval writers probably compared the vinegar to these medicinal substances. It would be nice to get the original Latin text of the monk Donizone who first wrote about it. See if you could hunt that up. Badagnani 01:51, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chuck Williams

I've heard claims that Chuck Williams, founder of Williams-Sonoma, had brought Balsamic Vinegar to the United States. Does anyone have any facts or contradictions to this claim? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dennislv (talk • contribs) 05:34, 13 September 2007 (UTC)