The subject of wine generates a staggering amount of information, opinion, and comment, all of it valid but much of it subjective and too much of it needlessly confusing or intimidating. Ultimately the most important thing anyone should know about wine is that it is was invented to be enjoyed (and to get people drunk). With that in mind, here are a few practical tips taken from the book that will hopefully help you to get the most from your encounters with wine.
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The involved process of thoroughly smelling and tasting a wine is one reason why aficionados love the stuff and a big reason that novices tend to be intimidated. Some people seem to regard wine almost as an intellectual pursuit. Others just like the taste or want to get drunk. On one hand it seems ludicrous to spend so long detecting every nuance of flavor in a wine. After all, when a plate of food arrives in a restaurant we don’t sit for five minutes smelling it to try to detect every ingredient and how they were cooked. Then again, there is probably no other drinkable liquid on earth that can pack as many complex aromas and flavors into a glass as wine, and certainly no other food product that can reflect so completely the place from which it came. |
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Probably as intimidating to many people as the smelling and tasting ritual is the question of how to match a wine with food, or vice versa. Like everything else to do with wine it ultimately boils down to personal taste and personal experience but also has some underlying principles worth knowing about. Learning from scratch how your favorite wine interacts on your palate with your favorite foods will increase your appreciation for both the wine and the food. Along the way you’ll probably discover the few combinations that really are best avoided and a few others that can make your taste buds sing. |
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If you’ve ever wondered how restaurants can justify charging more than $40 for a wine that you just bought in a tasting room for $20, the answer is fairly simple albeit hard to swallow. The markup helps restaurants cover their overhead costs, especially those related to the wine. It pays for the salary of a sommelier (so make sure you use his services), some of the salaries of the wait staff, spoilage of wine (by some estimates about 5 percent of all restaurant wines spoil before being opened), the cost of storing wine (wine cellars cost a lot of money), and all sorts of other costs of doing business, from the electricity bill to broken wine glasses that can cost a restaurant thousands of dollars a year to replace. |
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Research has revealed that most American consumers drink wine very soon after buying it, so storage is not a big issue for many. Aging wine even for a few years, however, can be rewarding but requires a little care to prevent the wine from spoiling. That pretty iron wine rack on top of a fridge opposite a sunny kitchen window? No good for anything other than keeping bottles for a few weeks until you get around the drinking them. |
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Wine Tips