Drying stands and the dryer-resistent decanter: How do you dry your wine carafe?

Who has got tips on decanter dryers?

Normally I find a drying stand ideal. The water drips out on its own with a little help from gravity.

But the skewed angle at which the curvier decanters hang off the stand can still allow draining water to pool in recessed areas and small depressions in the side of the carafe. Once it begins to form a puddle you know you're in trouble. The water will never evaporate. Those stubborn puddles of moisture that linger in the hard-to-reach areas of your wine decenter are even more stubborn as wintertime approaches.

So drying stands: not so easy after all.

I bought this pipe-cleaner at a restaurant supply store. I don't remember what the device was actually designed for, but as soon as I saw the pliable stem, soft scratch-free bristles on a long handle, I knew it would come in handy for the strange microclimates that habitually form in my carafe.

Here I am depicted struggling with this the other day. I had to go it again and again before the droplets of water finally receded.




You need more than to graze them with an absorbent surface. I think this concept for drying is the best idea but have never heard any testimonials as to whether it really works.

One good turn of the page deserves another: A wine tasting notebook for your wine buying guidebook

A great bottle of wine deserves a great tasting note.

Think of that today as the Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2007 comes out. It's that time of year when wine lovers will be given heaps of wine recommendations. My last post is an example -- Phaneuf's Quebec wine consumer guide that just appeared on Montreal shelves. No doubt that it is the ultimate stocking stuffer for the Québécois wino you love.

But the year-end roundups, ratings and rankings make for rather obvious, somewhat clichéed gifts. Leave them for the unfashionable to give. If I was getting myself a little gift during the upcoming holiday season, it would be the Wine Tasting Notebook, pictured above, from Steve De Long of De Long Wine Info.

This Wine Tasting Notebook, which is newly available on Steve's site (click through via the linked image above, or check my Blogroll for De Long Wine Moment), is comprised of a 60-page notebook and a fold-out spill-proof quick reference guide to wine tasting terms that flips over to reveal a step-by-step how-to instruction on taking tasting notes.

My first official wine tasting note -- way back in the day when this blog was still a baby -- was with Steve's guidance. But what can I say? You don't need to be a beginner to benefit from his clear and complete wine notes package. I love the design, the useful cheat sheets and the conciseness of his guidelines. I used them then and I use them now, with my Vistorta review from a few days ago being wine note #1 in the book he sent me.

In fact, forget beginners. This notebook arrived to save me just at the time when I was floundering amid dead soldiers (empty wine bottles are only a decorative touch until they outnumber the volumes on your bookshelf). I remember looking deep into the abyss of my cork drawer, wondering why I had all these corks and no notes to immortalize the wine they once stoppered. I was becoming a virtual black hole for wine. Taking tasting notes is the healthy way out, or at least that's the way I see it.

But most importantly, with Steve's terminology and how-to guides, your note taking won't flounder before your wine glass while your dinner sits there getting cold. He presents a painless solution. The pre-printed note pages are laid out to allow you to quickly circle, fill in the blanks and jot down your most salient thoughts. Most people don't realize that you don't need to write a book for these things (unless you are lucky enough to come across one of those wines that totally illuminate you, and in turn, your pen as it fills the entire page).

FRESH NEW DUDS TO KEEP THE WINO BEYOND REPROACH

Steve was kind enough to comp me a "Your Brain on Wine" T-shirt that was exactly my colour. It was a nice shade that Steve calls pencil shavings, which is wine tasting lingo for copper-grey.

My first time wearing it was at work. I had a dress shirt with check print over top of it. I remember I was meeting with the person who was previously my boss's boss. Like many of the people I work with, my ex-boss's boss knew about my wineblog after the local newspaper printed my full name and a URL.

It's not exactly fame though. To tell you the truth, I don't think anyone in the office actually follows my posts at all. They tend to try and track my hobby in another way. They study my clothes for traces of wine stains. Yes, this is the civilized society we live in. I believe it's most precisely called Schadenfreude.

So anyway I wasn't surprised when my ex-boss's boss paid me a back-handed compliment about my shirt as we exited the meeting room, saying that it suited me very much "...and you don't even see any marks from the wine..." [laughter].

At which point I did a Clark-Kent-in-a-phone-booth and graciously, yet somewhat indignantly, stuck out my unbuttoned chest to reveal my "Brain on Wine" T-shirt. And by way of correction, I replied: "Look -- the mark of wine is always there," gesturing with hand over heart. I think anyone watching from a distance would've wanted to have me committed. On second thought, those in my immediate midst too.

No matter. Problem solved. I don't think my coworkers will be searching me for wine stains anymore. Thanks to Steve.

How to wash the wine glasses you most cherish (One man's story of tough love turned ghastly)

Holy busted blind Riedels, Batman!


Hallowe'en won't be the same without my trusty pair of "trick or treat" stemless blind tasting glasses to raise my spirits.

Luckily I still have one glass left to drink with but as my friend Johanna, who brought these Riedels back from Austria for me, said: what's the point of tasting with only one blind tasting glass? You need at least two to generate intrigue. Just like you need more than one guest at a masquerade.



Even in shambles, my blind Riedel showed its beauty, its charm, its form and its function. No matter how I reconstructed the crime scene, this was one tough wine glass to read: The dark, nearly-black-but-kind-of-purplish glass masked its contents so well that's practically impossible to photograph the inside of its bowl, even with great lighting shining directly into it.

The black hole is such an apt metaphor for wine appreciation in my house.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Pose it and repose it as I may, the actual events leading up to my Riedel's demise confound me. I know fully well what happened but I have a hard time admitting it actually came to pass. The glass died in my own hands as a result of my own tough love -- harsh, abrasive and spotlessly clean.

Yes, I broke this glass washing it, something I hadn't done to a wine glass since my Spiegelau Spätburgunder glass bit the dust several years ago.

The problem is that washing stemware has a learning curve. Until you master it, you're on shaky ground. Once you master it, you're laughing. Laughing until stemless glasses come out and shake things up. Then you've got to rethink your whole approach.

HOW TO WASH YOUR FINE CRYSTAL (WITH STEMS ONLY)

The way I see it, stems are the easiest part of the glass to break yet the most integral part of the glass to prevent breakage, especially when washing up. Here's what I mean:

The trick when washing is to grasp the bowl of the glass with your two forefingers and your thumb. This way you do not to apply any direct or twisting pressure to the fragile stem. If you do, the image at left reveals the results (as you can see a wine glass with a snapped stem offers a unique opportunity to introduce a fancy candle snuffer/one heck of an expensive dust cover to you household, so it's not all bad).

But there's more! Grasping the bowl is sometimes not enough. Sudsy water can be slippery so I always hook my baby finger around the stem loosely. A good finger curl anchors the delicate process of washing (and drying too) and secures the glass should the bowl ever slip from your busy fingers and thumb.

Obviously, stemless glasses do not allow this. They lack this kind of forgiving component. Since there's no stem, more pressure ends up being applied to the bowl and rim to garner that same sense of kitchen-sink security, or in my case, my over-protective nature and...

Snap! Oh the irony!

Lesson 1: Don't smother the things you love so that the fear of losing them is what ultimately drives them away.

Lesson 2: [insert instructions on how to wash stemless glasses here]

Post-vacation blues: Wine fridge busted, stemware glued

And, ultimately, the adoption of a Michael Pollan approach to drinking wine

I thought the worst thing about my vacation ending would be going back to work. There'd be much less Vernaccia di San Gimignano to drink, my freedom would be reined in and all the decisions I had been making for myself, like when to get up and when to drink, would be made for me.

It turns out that the wino's fear of teetotaling lunches is minor compared to the reality that hit home when I returned from a week vacationing in New York and a couple of days in Niagara.

A few days after I got back, my hot and humid apartment finally amounted to too much for my little wine refrigerator, an appliance which claims to cool with a motor that uses about the same amount of energy as a household light bulb.

This may be a design flaw.

I've replaced a continually blown fuse several times now. The unit will not cease shorting out. Some free professional advice I got indicates that the short is happening either somewhere in the circuitry or the pea-like motor is to blame by somehow sucking up to much power, and for that, I might try inserting a more powerful fuse if I can find one that fits. A '97 Brunello, a 2000 Vintage Port and a Saint Émilion Grand Cru currently hang in the balance.

Luckily temperatures are moderating since my return home and, since I am around, I am ready and able to relocate prized bottles to my kitchen fridge as necessary in the interim. It's a drag but I can manage until I got to the bottom of it.

I turn to traditional time-tested craftsmanship when modern technology gets me down. My favourite wine glasses did a much better job welcoming me back home from my time away. They looked hale, hearty and ever bit as ready to go the distance as when I left town -- much more than I could say about my wine fridge. This was reassuring as I reached for a bottle to uncork.


Now this is a fine specimen: the Spiegelau Williamsberger Cabernet glass, second only to my prized Ravenscroft Unoaked Chardonnay glass.

I had left out some glasses out on the kitchen counter when I did the dishes just prior to leaving town for my trip (I have to admit it's a rare occurrence that every glass I own is clean and not in use at any given time). As a result of having the entire stemware collection washed, several of them didn't make it into the cupboard for safekeeping -- I just don't have the cupboard space to store them all. I would have to use both of my two wine glasses caddies to store the overflow from my cupboard.

In any case, the awaiting glasses were a welcome sight upon my return. Circling in to my trusty glass, I pour myself some wine.


IF EVER THERE WAS A REASON TO ASSESS THE NOSE OF A WINE . . .

I was weirded out when I stuck my nose in for a sniff. Something goopy was clinging to my face and interfering with a good clean smell and assessment of the wine's nose.

Very strange. I sniffed again and it was clear I was not imagining this odd sensation. What the...?


I recoiled, and then went in for a closer look. (Click to enlarge photos.)


My stemware had been cobwebbed all along the rim of the bowl. Gross! But I concluded that, apart from not creating the ideal tasting scenario, an eight-legged visitor in your stemware collection is not such a bad thing. Spiders like wine glasses because flies like wine. The spiders are my ally in making sure my wine gets drunk by me! I will never kill a spider in my house again!

So this news that the spiders were acting to protect my wine cheered me up. It almost made up for the fact that my wine fridge was doing just the opposite for my wine, sitting there lifeless, stuffy and dank, full of expensive bottles.

And then I thought some more about the stream of wine I poured in that glass and how didn't seem to shake the spidery structure much. It was a tribute to quality workmanship and ingenuity. Surely the hallmarks of an independent producer. This is one spider with passion!

As for how the wine itself measured up, stayed tuned for tomorrow's post!

I like to study in the library . . .

The volumes found in a winery's library are bottles, not books. That's just how it is. This makes me want to bone up.

They are measured by alcohol content, not by number of pages or by chapters. And, if you know the right librarian, the volumes are awarded rather than loaned. This sounds like my type of thing!

Sure I like to study in the library. And yes, for me this is definitely turning over a new leaf.

But like a too-good-to-be-true dream, the fantasy sputters to a full stop. The bubble bursts and you are no longer a kid in a candy store.

All these bottles, plus a couple of others not shown in this photo, went straight down the drain. Totally undrinkable. I wanted to contact the librarian to ask why anyone even bothers to catalog these things. I was even ready to accept an apology. They are way, way beyond serving.

So it's back to where I was when I put down Dickens. Beware the library!

Have wine caddy, will travel

Across town by bus to Italian food connoisseur Michael, whose dinner party had but two wine glasses...

Until he picked up the phone and called me.

My wine caddy is built to hold six wine glasses of virtually any size and shape: tall flutes, wide Barolos, outsized Burgundy fishbowls.

Its collapsable and padded section dividers also make nice compartments for bottles as well. On this particular occasion I was packing a bottle of Soave-type white wine called San Vincenzo from Anselmi and the deliriously wonderful Passito-di-Pantelleria, a Muscat dessert made in Sicily.

That still left room for four Spiegelau glasses, which would round out the stemware in Michael's kitchen to six. Six was a good number; no one would drink from the tumbler tonight.

I have to say that I ran for the bus with my caddy slung over my shoulder and the heavy wine bottles, still full, pressed up against the delicate glasses with no problem. It's a sturdy product I picked up from Ravenscroft, my crystal manufacturer of choice. (The reason I didn't fill the caddy with my precious Ravenscroft Hermitage glasses was not due to a lack of faith in the bag, but rather because I wanted to bring stemware that were styled more like Chianti glasses.)

As you can see in the photo of the caddy as it waits for the bus to pull up, there is a built-in retractable handle and wheels at the rear. The unit is fully mobile just as a travel bag is. What's more, not only do the interior dividers -- secured snuggly in place by velcro -- detach for cleaning, the whole bag can collapse and flatten when emptied.

Why would you ever want to break the caddy down into pieces? One reason is storage. I slip my caddy right underneath my tiny wine fridge for easy storage.

Another reason is that it does make things easier to clean after you have reloaded your caddy with the used glasses, dribbles of wine, lipstick traces and all.

Here we see my assistant the lovely Johanna demonstrating the wine caddy to our host upon our arrival.

So, is your stemware in a bad way? Just dial my number or call my name.

The heat is off

A welcome addition to any wine enthusiast's un-air-conditioned home! Yes, my wine fridge is finally here.

        

It looks like an extremely hefty microwave oven. It's about the size of one of those industrial ones they use in fast-food kitchens or the old-fashioned kind that used to pervade atop the Whirlpool range on The Price Is Right. Of course the marked difference is on the inside...


Barker's Beauties never opened up any home appliance to reveal 9 + 2 bottles in sweet 13-degree slumber! (I took out the eleventh bottle to better capture the inside of the fridge, but if you want to see what I'm packing in there, check online at manageyourcellar.com, the free cellar management software I use.)

I've been calling these units "wine fridges", but the manufacturer Chambrer calls them wine cellars. Installing it just ahead of the crest of summer's first heatwave, I can see why their term is more appropriate: You won't feel a gust of cool air coming out of this thing. Its lowest setting only seven degrees Celsius. It took a long time -- like an entire day -- to chill things down to cellar temps from the normal summer temperature of my apartment. But once it reached the target temp, a small motor which requires the same amount of power as a 100-Watt lightbulb seems to maintain levels quite easily. So far so good. My sister and her boyfriend set up the stand-up floor model at Christmas and I haven't heard any complaints from them.

Another thing that really made me realize this is more of a storage device than a refrigerator is the fact that I really still require my regular refrigerator to serve wines properly, especially in the summer. Even if you remove a special wine from storage for dinner, it's going to heat up fast on a hot Montreal night. This means I'm likely to slide the bottle inside the fridge door for chilling until my glass needs refilling.

When you're serving a lot of people, heat between pours may not become an issue. In my sauna-like surroundings, there's a complex formula involving speed of wine guzzling and ambient room temperature that is just beyond my reach so I just take a trial-and-error approach. In any case, party wines are less likely to be among those sacred few bottles you've got cellared away in perfect storage conditions. (To jump to a) Conclusion: Perhaps a wine cellar for storage buffered by another wine cellar for serving wouldn't be such a bad idea.

2006 Montreal Gift Show

Yesterday I made bookings for a trip to Montreal -- my parents', not mine. They will be attending the Montreal Gift Show, which runs from Sunday, August 27 to Wednesday, August 30. This image is from the show's site. Click on it for more detailed information.

I realize that this giant exhibition is no Montreal Salon des vins. In fact, it barely makes for a blue-collar version of it with all the glasses sparkling prettily yet noticeably empty. And yes, it's a far cry from the exploits of Beau Jarvis of Basic Juice who will be reporting from Austria or the travels of Dr. Vino who took his blog to Argentina and back.

But for my mom, a wine accessories buyer, the event is her Olympiad. (I should tell you that it actually comes in Summer and Winter editions, with a show in early March being the inaugural and snowy start to this series.) Mom will definitely enjoy herself. She always does. And if you are searching for a fancy decanter, designer stemware, or a cavalcade of bottle openers, it may be the event for you too.

How I organized my wine stash: The results are in and the results are online

I work in an office that governs an enormous Oracle database. My job includes finding ways to get people to manage the information correctly. In the office lunchroom, much to my satisfaction, if you want to use the fridge, you've got to use a sticker to label your lunch.

But it the control issues go further than that. I guess you could say that I take my work home with me: I love labelling, sorting, analyzing and generally crunching data. With that in mind, it's no surprise that I encourage wine lovers to get themselves a cellar management system. Even if you don't naturally gravitate towards organizational behaviour, and even if you don't even have a real cellar, there are important reasons why you should think about getting your bottles in order.

After much effort at the last minute, I finished uploading my collection of red wines to ManageYourCellar.com. All I want to do now is play around with my new sortable online data! But before I do, I will take a moment to say that I really recommend this particular system. It's easy to use and entirely free. This, along with the fact that it is online, made it pretty much a shoe-in as my tool of choice, though other tools like Tony Aspler: The Wine Guy (sorry Tony, didn't mean to call you a tool) and Cellar! Wine Software, CellarTracker! have free demos available online. (All those exclamation marks -- you can almost tell they are trying to get you to buy something at some point.)

ManageYourCellar.com on the other hand has no hidden fees (or exclamation marks). And it is quite straightforward. Once you understand the idea that certain bits of the data on the system are integral and cannot be changed, you can speed along with the upload process -- even using a multi-bottle form for entering your bottles in batches. Then you supply your own personal information which hang off the records on the system. This is the info that you maintain yourself. If a particular wine has not already been entered into the database, then you can initiate an entry for it, checking to ensure that such a wine is not already listed.

Obviously, as with any database, integrity of data is important. In the world of wine, which can be an adventure in deciphering languages and labels, the need to speak in common terms is essential, above all for a database. It is clear that Catherine Granger, the inventor of ManageYourCellar.com, strives to keep duplicates from propagating on the system. Catherine is concerned about keeping the data in good shape, and as she personally indicated to (paranoid) me, she backs up user data on a separate server each night to protect against the data loss of a system crash.

Catherine is a very responsive cellar master too. She is prompt in replying to queries and I believe she is friendly enough to respond to her community's suggestions for improvement. I'm thinking of suggesting a table to show the estimated price versus the acquired price. Maybe there is a way to do this already and I need explore the software further, but it seems to me that while the estimated value can be displayed in a column, the acquisition cost value cannot. Perhaps a report could put these numbers back-to-back, and even better, automatically calculate the total spent versus the total value. That would really interest me and my bargain-hunting tendencies.

In any case, you can see my cellar online if you are interested. As a registered user, I can select those people who have viewing access to my information. The catch is you have to be identifiable to the system, meaning you do need to register with ManageYourCellar.com. That is simple enough though, since little more than a email address is necessary (the email address is for identification rather than for mass mailouts, as I can say that I am not being bombarded by incoming messages). Please drop me a line if you are part of this interesting online community. Here's to happy cellaring.

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.