(Munchies.Vice) - In the late 1800s in Mendoza, Argentina’s largest wine-producing area, business was booming. Local bodegas (wineries, in the local parlance) were challenged with supplying an ever-growing demand and resorted to ditching labor-intensive European winemaking techniques in favor of combining vast quantities of grapes, yeast, and sugar in underground concrete vaults and crossing their fingers. It was the winemaking equivalent of “winging it” and the results were invariably crap.

Things remained unchanged for the next 100 years until the bodegas realized that there was much more money to be made in the export market. Argentines had grown accustomed to their churlish and cheap table wine, but Europe and North America seemed to enjoy their more refined blends. Yet if the bodegas were to have any hope of competing internationally, they had to undergo significant procedural changes to improve the quality of the wine and upgrade the equipment. So they did, and this is why the whole world is able to enjoy Argentine wines today.

Argentina as a country remains ideologically stuck in between these two periods; while society craves the modern luxuries of the Western world, rules and laws often feel like general suggestions, to be interpreted at will and rarely enforced by the police. It is thanks to this poor enforcement, however, that activities like drunken bike-riding between the bodegas of Mendoza can prosper.

"Of these two costs the cell needs to consider when generating energy, the cost of carbon is universally recognized, that is, respiration is more carbon-efficient. What we established in this study is that the cost of making the energy-generating apparatus is also substantial, and is in fact the dominant cost for fast growing cells."

The idea of this opportunity cost to cell growth was first suggested several years ago by a team of theoretical biologists from the Netherlands. In the UC San Diego study, Hwa and his collaborators experimentally characterized the cost of synthesizing fermentation versus respiratory enzymes by using proteomic mass spectrometry and discovered that respiratory proteins are twice as expensive as fermentation proteins for the same rate of energy generation. Their study is the first time such a cost has been established for any living system. The researchers also developed a mathematical model that quantitatively predicted the pattern of metabolic waste excretion in response to perturbations they applied to affect the physiological state of growing cells.

While it is not clear whether the same rationale underlies the origin of "wasteful metabolism" in cancer, the researchers said, they believe their results provide another way to think about the process.

On a warm Saturday morning in November, we waited in line at Baccus Bike Wine Tours in the small village of Chacras de Coria, just outside the city of Mendoza. The apparent owner of the business, Diego, delivers the same speech time after time to Americans, Australians, and Brits about which bodegas they should visit and where they should go for lunch. Bike helmets are always optional.

We then chose our bikes, pumped up the tires, and (upon request) were handed helmets. After all, the idea was to get drunk and ride bikes—but safely. The route would take us to three bodegas over the course of the day with an overall distance of around 25 kilometers of cycling.

As we set off, the grand trees lining the streets of the village sheltered us from the uncharacteristically fierce spring sunshine. The dirt roads and plenitude of rusting cars were a needed reminder that we were in South America, especially when trees opened or you turned a corner and suddenly the majestic, snow-capped Andes became visible.