The Great Underwater Wine and Cheese Party

This is an image taken from an article about an experimental Siberian wine cellar. The plastic container isn't the cellar, it's just the protective vessel that will used for cellaring. That part is important because the storage site is the bottom of a frozen body of water. I did mention experimental, right? I'll have to find out the results of this experiment, conducted by Russian wine anarchists. In the meantime, read about their idea.

Should a bottle ever break free of its vessel during a future cellaring attempt by Russian wine anarchists, I sincerely hope it ends up in a swift-flowing current that leads it directly to Quebec's lost cheese.

Backwash
Speaking of wines under ice, what about ice wine? And what is Sauternes? To acknowledge some readers' questions from the last post, today's dessert wine tasting was indeed sweet. Which is what Sauternes is. Usually when we think of sweet wines, or more specifically dessert wines, we think of ice wine. This is primarily because we are Canadian. Sauternes, however, is perhaps the definitive sweet wine because of its rich heritage and noble Bordeaux provenance. In fact it is so noble that the rotting of the grapes used to make Sauternes is referred to as "noble rot". Another slightly oxymoronic thing about Sauternes is the idea that, like many dessert wines, it can be served after the meal with a sugary course or before the meal as an aperitif. Today's tasting did a good job of suggesting when to open your sweet wine and with what. Don't miss next week's session, which is the last one until mid-January.