Though wine can be enjoyed on its own, a good pairing with the right foods can transform an ordinary meal into an extraordinary meal. Thankfully, Wine That Loves is here to help, with sommelier chosen wines that are perfectly paired to a single type of food. The end result is a match between some of the world’s top-quality wines and the foods Americans enjoy most often. There’s no fu-fu stuff here, just affordable, high quality wines that can be enjoyed with everyday meals. Pair away.
On behalf of the Earth, I’d like to say thanks to Wolf Blass for bottling their Bilyara Reserve in P.E.T. bottles. Unlike the traditional colored glass used in wine bottles which can only be “downcycled” into lower grade products, P.E.T. can be recycled into many equivalent products, so it produces 80% less wastes than traditional bottles. Plus, it makes the bottles “unbreakable”. It’s environmental.
If you’re going to enjoy a nice bottle of old red wine, you’re going to need to decant it, or remove the insoluble solids from the delightful drink by slowly pouring the wine into another container so as not to disturb the sediment. Though doing it by hand is cheaper, it’s not necessarily easier nor does it yield the best results. To get the perfect separation of liquid from solid, you’ll need a decanting machine. The Ercuis Wine Decanting Machine provides a little bit of style to your decanting needs, and would even serve as a nice centerpiece or conversation starter when guests ask why your wine bottle holder looks so funny. Made in France with an ebonized wooden base and silver plating, it looks just as good as it performs (and it performs pretty well indeed).
Rich Prosecco is “Vino Frizzante”, or very nice sparkling wine in a very un-nice aluminum can. From their site: “Drinking Prosecco from a can is delicious; as you sip, the pearling sensation of the cool, fresh-tasting Prosecco ripples over the lip of the can to dance on your tongue”. Wow, drinking this stuff sounds like a party in your mouth and everyone’s invited. And if you’re going to throw a party and invite everyone, you RSVP list won’t be complete without the likes of Paris Hilton. Luckily, Paris has just signed up to be Prosecco’s newest spokesmodel, and given her recent run-in with the cops and the letters BAC, she’s the perfect choice for putting her seal of approval all over an alcoholic product for the rich and famous. Keep your eyes peeled for a Prosecco NASCAR team in the coming weeks, since no beverage in a can is complete without a sponsorship of America’s pastime.
Here’s a fun game to make everyone else play before cracking into that bottle of wine you brought to the party (and probably even more fun after you’ve cracked and finished another bottle). Called Don’t Break The Bottle, it’s a brainteaser puzzle, made of wood, beads and rope, which prevents the bottle of wine from being opened until it’s solved. The object is to maneuver all the different parts of the puzzle so that the bottle can be taken out intact, which may involve pushing the ball through, passing the rope over, or pulling the block around. It looks easy enough, but soon you’ll understand the meaning of the name, as you picture yourself throwing it against a wall and sucking what remains after the crash through a straw.
If you’re looking for the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to build a wine cellar in your own home, the spiral cellar is for you. A watertight, pre-cast cylindrical system is sunk into the ground, and can be located anywhere, from your kitchen to your conservatory, workshop to your study. Designed to keep up to 1,600 bottles in ideal storage conditions, it relies on the surrounding earth for its insulation, like a traditional cellar, plus an ingenious airflow system, requiring no power to maintain the constant optimal temperature (10°C, plus or minus five degrees with no fluctuations) and humidity (70% to prevent the cork from drying out). Once you pay for the cellar, there are no additional costs, except for the wine itself, of course. A cellar is the only way of ensuring that the wine you’re drinking is in ideal condition, so if you always like to have a few dozen bottles around the place and tend to keep bottles for months or years before drinking them, you need a cellar to keep your wine in pristine condition. It even comes with a secret trap door so you can pretend you’re escaping from evil villains every time you go to get a bottle. Sounds like the perfect addition to any home, I just wonder if they can put one in my bedroom.
Below is a flash movie about the features of the cellar. Click on the green buttons for explanations of each feature.
Pomegranates are one of the hottest trends in the food industry. Full of antioxidants and vitamins, the pomegranate is gaining popularity for its health benefits as well as its taste. Now, an Israeli winery has created the first pomegranate wine. Pomegranates usually don’t have enough natural sugars to ferment into alcohol on their own, but the family that created the wine worked for years to create a fruit that was sweeter than any other pomegranate variety, and thus suitable for wine making. So far they have created a dry wine, a dessert wine, a port wine, and a rose style wine, each with its own distinct taste and characteristics. Plans include export to the US, so be on the lookout for pomegranate wine at your local wine shop, and try a little something different the next time you’re in the mood for some vino.
Did you know that you are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider? Sad but true. If you want to avoid an untimely trip to the emergency room following your next celebration cider opening, and find it hard if not impossible to control the cork trajectory on your own, then the Cork Catcher should be your next bubbly accessory purchase. “Simply remove the foil and cage, place the Cork Catcher on the bottle, hold firm and twist the bottle…pour and serve!” You get to enjoy the pop of the cork without feeling the pop of an eye. Sounds like a lifesaver to me.
Oxygen and heat are the worst enemies of any great wine collection. If you’re going to open a bottle, you better plan on finishing it quickly, as the air that ads to the tongue pleasing aroma will quickly destroy that same great taste and nose. The Oxygen Displacing And Cooling Wine Vault from Hammacher Schlemmer “uses inert argon gas to completely displace oxygen through a specially designed reusable cork, which vents oxygen through eight apertures in its body, maintaining a vacuum between the surface of the wine and the outside air, and thereby preserving and maximizing a wines unique qualities for up to two weeks”. The vault holds up to 14 bottles, or 12 if you keep one vertical for viewing through the polycarbonate window to display the label. The inside is illuminated by six LEDs to prevent temperature change from the lighting, and is cooled using heat pipe technology to disperse heat without a lot of fan noise. It even features user-controlled temperatures so you can cellar your reds at 55-57 degrees and your whites at 45 degrees. Sounds like the perfect way to store and enjoy a growing wine collection.
NEC System Technologies has developed a robot that tastes wine, can name the brand from a tiny sip, tell if that specific bottle has gone bad, and recommend a complementary cheese to go with each variety. Using an infrared spectrometer in its left arm, the robot fires a beam of infrared light, and analyzes the reflected light in real time to determine the chemical composition. The two foot tall green and white prototype can even tell you a thing or two about the taste, such as being a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz. Too bad it doesn’t actually drink the wine and then act robotically drunk after it polishes off a bottle or two.
