Designing a lighter Champagne bottle
Have you ever lifted a bottle of champagne and thought, “Wow, that’s heavy!” Well, the bottles are heavy partly with good reason: to contain all the sparkly goodness, which can be six times the atmospheric pressure. (And, of course, there’s a little bling factor to the bulk.) Apparently, before sufficiently strong bottles were developed, cellar...
Kangaroo testicles? An impossible food-wine pairing
Who is man enough for an impossible food-wine pairing? Well, for those with a set of steel, head on over to the seventh (!) annual World Testicle Cooking Championship in Serbia. There, the AP reports that chefs prepare bull, boar, camel, ostrich and kangaroo testicles in such dishes as testicle pizza and testicles in bechamel...
Wherefore art thou, rosé in a box?
A couple of years ago, I had an op-ed in the NYT arguing for wine in a box. Since then, box wine sales have skyrocketed and many more selections, both foreign and domestic, have come on the market. But one category that seems woefully underrepresented stateside is rosé. Given that it is perhaps the quintessential...
Wine, alcohol, and tax – in Wine & Spirits magazine
How often is the alcohol level stated on the label consistent with what is actually in the bottle? Wines are allowed a certain fudge factor between what appears on the label and what is actually in the bottle. For wines under 14%, the wine can fluctuate by 1.5 percentage points, which explains why so many...
Red wines that chill
Chilled red. It sounds like an oxymoron. Or something that would get your membership revoked at the club. But, in fact, it works. The key is to choose a red wine that is low in tannin, which explains why Beaujolais from the thin-skinned Gamay grape, often is the prime red candidate for chilling. Bringing the...
Pairing whites with the thermometer – summer edition
The other day, I was waiting for a train or a plane, flipping through magazines at a newsstand. I picked up the August copy of Food & Wine and saw Ray Isle’s fun, simple graphic suggesting changing white wines as the weather heats up. Since I wrote a whole book centered on pairing wine with...
Oodles of noodles – and corks
Today’s summer wine factoid: Nomacorc, a purveyor of plastic wine closures that require a corkscrew to remove, was the brainchild of a Belgian businessman who made a fortune manufacturing extruded plastics, including pool noodles. So if you’ve been floating around in the pool this summer and sensed a connection, you’re right. In related news, plastic...
Wine list X-Ray, Monty Python, natural wine – all LOL sipped & spit!
SIPPED: X-Ray vision for wine lists? The above image comes from wondertonic.tumblr.com SIPPED: satire HoseMaster continues his discussion of Carbon Footprint wines, including “Creeping Deforestation” & “Screw the Ozone” [HoseMaster of Wine] SIPPED: dug up from the cellar “Perth Pink….This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.”...
Worms & “the truffle kid”
Recently, my seven-year-old son dug up some worms, made a sign, set up a table on the street and sold them for ten cents each. “Great for your garden! Great for fishing!” ran his pitch. He made $9, including tips. That’s almost better than wine writing! On a somewhat related note, check out the profile...
What would it take for a sommelier to pull a JetBlue jumper exit?
This week’s big story is the dramatic, emergency-slide resignation of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. Following verbal abuse from a passenger, he took to the PA system to let everyone on board know that he’d had enough, popped the inflatable emergency slide, threw down his carry-ons, grabbed a couple of beers from the drinks cart,...
Imbibing idiots, seeds, cartel, AOCs – sipped & spit
SPIT: “imbibing idiot bias” Job applicants who partake in alcoholic drinks are perceived as less intelligent and hireable according to a new academic study, dubbing the phenomenon an “imbibing idiot bias.” In the actual experiments, the subject ordered a glass of “house merlot,” so perhaps the conclusion is valid. But what if the subject ordered...
The Champagne of White Zinfandels?
Site reader Supertunaman sent in this label shot (about the quality of most UFO sighting photos) with the comment, “LOLOL!” What’s so funny? If Miller is the Champagne of Beers, perhaps this is the Champagne of White Zinfandels? Actually, since a 2005 bilateral accord between the US and the EU, the term Champagne cannot be...
