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That’s right - Friday signals the end of the mind-numbing, soul-destroying monotony of the working week and ushers in two whole days of rest and relaxation. What better way to mark this joyous occasion than with a nice glass or two of vino? And tonight you can bet that up and down the country revelers will be sipping everything from Lambrini to Veuve Clicquot, Blue Nun to Blossom Hill.
Wine is certainly one of my favoured tipples. It has betrayed me a few times but I consider it a generally reliable going-out friend. I wonder though whether wine has been keeping secrets from me: what has it got up its alcoholic little sleeve?
The first hurdle that must be leapt when meeting a new bottle of wine is how to get it out. The traditional method is certainly a corkscrew (where do they go at parties!?) and for a look at corkscrews through the ages I’d certainly recommend the charming website of the Virtual corkscrew museum.
However for those of you that find the corkscrew a little too taxing for your drunken brains there is hope on the horizon: the ergonomic wonder that is the screw top. Apparently top French wineries have been piping up in its defence as a screw top avoids the problem of wines being corked. The good news for those of us without expansive wine racks is that the screw top is better suited to wines that are intended to be consumed soon after bottling (less politely put: cheap wine).
These developments in stopper technology might be good news for the corkscrew-challenged consumer but they’re pretty bad news for Portugal which has 1/3 of the world's cork forests and supplies 85-90% of the cork used in the U.S. Now I wasn’t aware that cork is actually the bark of the cork tree, and what’s more it can only be harvested every nine years!
Once you’ve got the wine out of the bottle you’ve got to start thinking about the glass. A proper red wine glass has an inward-sloping lip to capture the aromas of the wine and deliver them to your nose.
A proper red wine glass has an inward-sloping lip to capture the aromas of the wine and deliver them to your nose
Once you’ve absorbed the scents, to properly taste wine you have to hold a small amount of it in the back of your mouth, at the top of your throat and breathe in through it.
Now I know that this sounds mental but just give it a try the next time you’re cracking open a pinot, it’s amazing how much you can actually taste – it also really brings out the alcohol sensation, unless that’s just the wine that I’m drinking.
And, would you look at that, like the ramblings of an old smelly wino, I have strayed so far from the intended topic of discussion that I haven’t managed a single fact about wine in the whole of today’s column. I do feel a little more knowledgeable about the paraphernalia though, pretty sure I can whip out a few of these gems in the pub. And anyway, there’s always next week…
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