The glass with red wine holds the answer to a mystery

Here's a fun wine decoder trick you can try. I found it buried in the bottom of my inbox during a recent email clean-up en masse.

This handy tip was sent to me from a coworker I used to work with. I had no idea he ever drank wine, never mind that he could appreciate wine with such versatility and creativity, and at the same time demonstrate the practical nature that keeps the best wine drinkers from extinction, i.e. budget-mindedness.

Though it's an old message, I doubt the techniques he describes below will ever cease to solve the puzzle in question here. No, it's a not the common puzzle of how to decode a wine label with all its various and often highly obscure information -- for that please take a look at last month's Wine Label Week.

Nevertheless the trick below may enlighten more than a few winos out there.

(By the way, check the enterprising last line that my ex-coworker writes -- you've got to love it. Who hasn't wanted to make a little profit from whatever kind of oenological specialty or secret wine knowledge you have come to wield as a wino?)

It is summer and I am in high spirits so I am sending you a message that might save you some money.

Everybody probably has those Ultramar coupons that give you secret discounts. The trouble is how can you tell which ones are a dollar and which ones are 75 cents. Obviously you would like to use the dollar ones before you lose them.

Here comes the red wine. If you look through the open end of the glass through the red wine at the coupon, the red of the wine will filter out the red covering on the blue writing. Furthermore looking through the wine glass will magnify your secret discount denomination also.

If you don't drink, send me a bottle of wine and I will be happy to read them for you.