Pleasures of the vine can seem cumbersome due to the snobbish rituals imposed upon us by those trendy bistros. But, in fact, the proper service of wine can be painless and easily put to use.

The only real necessities in your pursuit are clean glasses and a corkscrew. Two wine glasses are always better than one. The journey through a great bottle of wine is certainly not a solo mission. Some of the most pleasing aspects of the wine are exposed when it is shared.

Let’s begin with the basics,

• How to Taste Wine

The capacity of the bowl should be at least ten ounces or so, this gives you plenty of room to “swirl” the wine to release it’s bouquet when tasting.
All the different shapes of glasses sometime seems overwhelming but, as a rule of thumb, choose a glass with a basic “U” shaped bowl. These are the most durable and can be very versatile as everyday drinking ware. If you really decide to splurge and surround yourself with different glassware for each style of wine, tall thin flutes are for sparkling wines, smaller glasses that seem to curve in at the rim are for young wines, while those fish bowls with stems are for big, robust red wines.

Just a hint, when seriously tasting wines, real veterans hold the glass by the stem, don’t touch the bowl of the glass with your hands. Experience tells us that the heat from your fingers warms the chilled wine and fingerprints inhibit the visual examination.
Just remember to keep a good grip, wine always tastes better from a glass versus the rug!

Corkscrews are like doorknobs, they have all different personalities but seem to have a singular task. When selecting this important piece of equipment, realize you may be using this tool for many vintages to come so you may as well choose a quality one.
The coil that is inserted into the bottle should be at least two inches long. A shorter coil won’t be able to penetrate the dense corks used by some of the finer vineyards. The coil should also be wide or open down the center; this insures a good grip on the cork when pulling it through the neck of the bottle. Coils that resemble more a drill bit do nothing more than bore a hole through a soft cork. In this situation, one would need a straw. Most pulls are equipped with a folding knife on the side. This is used to cut the capsule off below the neck of the bottle so the wine doesn’t touch it as is it's poured. A true wine snob would refer to this procedure as “de-flowering” the bottle, while some of us call it “cutting the top off”.

The proper temperature for serving wine is basic and straight forward although often debated.

Dry white wines like Chardonnays or Sauvignon Blancs are normally chilled to keep them fresh and crisp.

Red wines are best at room temperature so you can enjoy some of their more concealed layers of flavor.

Dessert wines or after dinner cordials like Port, Sherry or late harvest Germans fall somewhere in between, depending on taste. (Your taste by the way, not your waiter’s.)

If you’ve ever had a long wait for your entree at your favorite restaurant, I’m sure there has been a clever server to explain the mystery of letting the wine “breathe” before dinner. This isn’t altogether a simple stall tactic.

Uncorking a young red gives the surface of the wine exposure to air and this softens its puckery tannins and makes it smoother and much more drinkable. To achieve the best results when letting a wine aerate, pour it into a carafe or a decanter. If no container is handy, at least pour the wine into your glasses a couple of minutes before serving. The exposure of wine to air in each glass is considerably greater than if it simply remains in an open bottle.

Make the enjoyment of wine fit your lifestyle, it can be as laid back as jeans and a T-shirt or as elegant as a top hat and tails.

Cheers!

In the ether, there are a few hundred long chain hydrocarbon molecules which we can taste. Of major importance among them are several alcohols. The nuances of taste and aroma come from numerous esters and hydrocarbons which symbiotically interact with those alcohols and residual sugars that make up wine. To a degree slightly higher alcohol levels in wine serve to enhance those tastes.

Big vat wine producers destroy many of the kinds of exquisite flavor components that come from specific grapes and specific soils and specific oak barrels and can best be coaxed into a bottle in small batches and by frequent and talented tasting and blending.

Small lot, Vineyard Designated winemaking is the high taste game in which superwine oenophile/vintners are today playing and succeeding.

The people who market wine in America's supermarkets, have figured out that wines called rosé don't sell, so they invented the term blush wines. Lest someone figured out that blush is a synonym for rosé, the labels call the wine white. But even a child can see that White Zinfandel is really pink.

The blush wines that call themselves white are fairly sweet. Wines labeled rosé can be sweetish, but some wonderful rosés from Europe, like our Contessina, are more semi-sweet. Although a lot of hard-core wine lovers hardly ever drink rosé wine, we love to drink Contessina in the summer.

Even if a rosé wine is dry, most people will assume that it's sweet, because the common perception among Americans is that rosés are sweet. Yet lots of people who drink White Zinfandel believe that they're drinking a dry wine, because it's not called rosé.

...wine is mankind's most ancient medicine. Cheers to that indeed! There are a few passions in life that are both enjoyable and beneficial to health at the same time. It is perhaps why wine drinking is becoming such a fad in even the non-traditional Asia region. While there were initial claims that the benefits of wine were folklore created by wine makers to propogate wine drinking, increasing research by many reputable research centers have concluded that it is indeed no folklore. In fact, they discovered many other benefits of wine as well! Here are some of them:

Heart Disease
Wine is a vasodilator that helps reduce the risk of cardiac diseases including angina and stroke. It helps in two ways. Red wines have HDL (a good cholesterol) that drives the bad cholesterol from the arteries. Red wine also contains an antifungal compound called Resveratrol that can lower serum cholesterol.

Digestion
Wine stimulates flow of gastric juices to enhance the digestive processes. It has also shown that wines kill cholera bacteria and can combat typhoid.

Vitamins and Minerals
Wine contains utilizable minerals of potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, phosphorus, Vitamin B and P.

Viruses
Red wines have polyphenols that are effective against some viruses.

Aging
Elderly people who drink moderate amounts are less prone to disability due to mental illness. Some attribute it to the mineral boron which helps older women to maintain their oestrogen which in turn enables them to absorb calcium.

Cancer
Red wine contains a strong anti-cancer agent known as quercetin which becomes active in the body when the grape juice ferments or the body digests food. Wine also contains gallic acid, an acknowledged anti-carcinogenic.

Stress
Wine is a mild tranquilizer that can help reduce stress, which in turn can help prevent certain forms of cancer.

Kidney
Wine can enhance the alkaline reserves, effectively combating kidney acidosis.

Migraine
Red wine inhibits an enzyme called PST-P which detoxifies all sorts of bacteria in the stomach. The absence of PST-P is linked to migraine.

Winegrowers in the Langeudoc-Rousillion region of France have put five policemen in hospital over the falling prices of French wine.

Over 8,000 wine producers converged in the town of Nimes to protest about a 30% fall in prices of Vin de Pays and Vin de Table wines; this represents a drop in income the growers can ill afford. Protests in December of last year were carried out without trouble but several days of meetings and rousing speeches have led to the present outbreak of violence.

Over £700,000 worth of damage has been caused as motorway tollbooths were smashed and police cars set on fire during clashes. At least one local negociant who imports foreign wine had his premises ransacked by masked thugs and his wine stores destroyed.

Prices of French Vin de Pays and Vin de Table are falling because of weak foreign exports. Producers had been hoping to cash in on the 1996 and 1997 phyloxerra outbreak in California which was to lead to a shortfall in the market and a ready-made customer base for its newly planted vines including Chardonnay and Cabernet. But California recovered from the disease much quicker than had been expected leading to a massive surplus of Vin de Pays and Vin de Table wines and a subsequent fall in value.

The winegrowers are demanding subsidy from the EU to pay for 25% of regional production to be distilled to form the basis of spirit drinks as a temporary measure.

Sopexa, the UK promotional body for French wine, declined to comment on the situation.

Drink wine get smarter

A glass and a half of wine a day could help improve the little grey cells and stop the progression of braindisorders, according to new research. Scientists at the Human Institute at the University of Milan say achemical produced by wine could help a brain enzyme to function by up to seven fold.

According to the New Scientist, Alberto Bertelli and his colleagues have found that the chemical resveratrol, found in grapes and wine which fights infection in vines, helps the enzyme Map-kinase to regenerate neural cells. They tested the chemical on human neural cells in laboratory conditions and found it made them grow extensions which helped them to connect up with each other.

Are there too many grapes?
NAPA and SONOMA Wineries don't think so.
Monday, October 1, 1998
GEORGE SCHOFIELD St Helena (WNN) --
The California Central Valley has planted many many acres to winegrapes.

First Napa and now Sonoma have been replanting to replace their Phylloxera vulnerable but highly productive AXR rootstock vineyards. Those replantings are unproven to be heavy producing vines as of yet. Production statistics for Napa Valley are as follows: Consumption of ultra premium wines from Napa Valley are increasing at approximately __% per year for the past decade. The jury is still out on what to expect on the long wave.

The wonderful world of Disney World

At Walt Disney World on any given day, waves of stroller-pushing, camera-toting parents make their way through spotless avenues; wide-eyed children pursue the ever-grinning Mickey Mouse; and a cacophony of excited screams, splashes and special effects resounds in the family-friendly park.

Yet high above the chaos and clamor, guests may step into a very different world of Disney. This one, 15 stories up, offers bottles of wine rather than bottlenecked lines. Instead of tasteful fantasy, it delivers fantastic tastes.