My wife likes to tease me by saying that I “woefully under-decant.” I don’t think so. But it is true that I rarely decant. And I admit that a few times I’ve been burned by not decanting — take the example of the Glen Carlou 2005 Grand Classique I wrote about recently. In fact, the Grand Classique, which tasted “weird” when I opened it but delicious the next day, inspired me to review my theory about when (and when not) it’s a good idea to decant. For my guide, click here for more:
 
As most of you know, decanting is a process whereby you pour a bottle of wine into a larger vessel, usually designed to expose the wine to oxygen, so that it can sit and aerate. Depending on the wine, some people will decant for hours before drinking. The idea is that the exposure to oxygen softens the wine and allows hidden aromas and flavors to emerge. That’s it — unless you want to get into the snob factor behind decanting, which is definitely at play for some drinkers, since somebody apparently is spending almost $500 on penis-substitutes like this three-foot-high python-shaped disseminator.
 
The first instance in which, in my opinion, it’s a good idea to decant is when the wine you’re drinking is very fine and very young. See, unlike everyday wine which is made to be ready to drink (and indeed, 90 percent of all bottles of wine are ingested within 24 hours of purchase), fine wine is made to be unfit for immediate consumption. With collectible, expensive wines, the ideal drinker is a devotee who buys it every year, often by the case, cellars it, and enjoys it over time. She likes to witness how — because of the micro-oxygenation that occurs with the air left in the bottle, plus the tiny bit of porosity of the cork — the wine pokes its head out, blossoms, fades, and then dies, sometimes over the course of 20 years or more.
 
Sometimes, though, you just can’t wait. And that’s when a decanter comes in handy. It fast-forwards the ageing process, so that wines built for the long haul can be enjoyed in the short term.
 
The only other time I think wine should be decanted? Precisely the opposite situation: when the wine is very fine and very old. This is because after a fine wine has sat around for a long time, it tends to throw off sediment, and you don’t want that bitter, mucky stuff going into your glass. So decanting — even the seemingly pretentious method you see in restaurants, where the sommelier pours the wine from the bottle to the decanter over a candle — helps you see when the sediment starts to travel toward the neck, at which moment you stop dispensing. Then I recommend you serve the wine in the decanter immediately. In this instance, we are dealing with a wine at its maturity, so decanting is not about aerating. In fact, further exposure to oxygen can cause a delicate old wine to expire before your eyes.
 
So now you see why I rarely decant. Fortunately, it’s very rare that I risk infanticide on a fine young wine. Unfortunately, it’s even rarer that I get a chance to drink very fine, very old wines. In fact I might never decant if there weren’t two corollaries to my rule. For example I am coming around to my wife’s opinion that, young or old, French wine should always be decanted. She feels that Burgundy and Bordeaux in particular taste horrible upon first sip but then delicious if you revisit a half hour later. Alice’s axiom was reinforced for me recently at a dinner party when I poured sans decanting a 2002 red Burgundy, a Chambolle-Musigny from Pierre Bertheau et Fils. After we toasted and took our first sip we reared back, surprised by the utter absence of flavor. “It’s over the hill already!” I exclaimed, embarrassed. But on Alice’s advice we simply put our glasses at the end of the table and then came back 45 minutes later. And what a change. It was as if the wine woke up, gasped, literally filled its lungs with air, and was reborn with all its fruit and earth and spice flavors intact.
 
A final, related addendum to the rule: if a wine you expect to be good tastes bad, try decanting. Often, strange aromas and flavors can “blow off” in a decanter. Again, this may be especially true of wines of foreign origin, such as the Grand Classique from South Africa that got me started on all this. You can bet that (even though the Grand Classique is cheap, young, not French, but as it turns out delicious) I’m going to decant the weird stuff right out of my next bottle before I take a sip.

There are a number of wine tasting party kits on the market, all of them having the advantage that a wine tasting event, no matter how poorly organized or equipped, is kind of hard to torpedo. A pretty table, delicious snacks, good friends, ten bottles of wine … what possibly could sink this ship? So I had my doubts when I received an email from Time to Wine asking if I’d test their kit for Wine Girl Online. My pessimism deepened when I took the bonus quiz ahead of time and discovered an ill-posed question and an ugly typo.

For how this kit soon cured of my crabbiness, click here:

With the help of the Ladies Tasting Society, I was set straight. Last night, we didn’t just take this wine-tasting kit on a cruise. We braved the Cape of Good Hope in search of the best Argentinean malbec we could drink for under $45. The report?

Time for Wine has put together a handy, good-looking kit that is fully equipped to entertain the wine novice and the jaded palate alike. We were eight women, ranging from a wine professional who worked for a high-end spirits company, to a new member who wouldn’t know a luxury cuvée if it hit her in the wallet. But every last one of us enjoyed the festive components of the kit, the competitive structure of the tasting, and the bonus quiz (Time for Wine’s apparent disinclination toward hiring a proofer notwithstanding).

What sets this kit apart is that it includes a sheet of shiny gold stickers that, after all the wines have been sampled, each guest can adhere to the mylar cover over her favorite bottle. (The bottle with the most stickers wins.) This step caused us endless amusement, emphasis on endless, since one guest had to revisit nearly every bottle before she could decide which deserved her sticker. By the time she did, she bore some resemblance to Eddie and Patsy of Absolutely Fabulous when they visited a château in France, got so schnockered they couldn’t remember which wine they liked best, and so bought them all. After much teasing and laughter, our friend cast her vote — as it turned out, on her own malbec and the winner of the tasting, Monteviejo’s 2005 “Lindaflor.” (Time to Wine recommends that the hostess purchase a little gift for the guest who brought the group favorite.)

As dinner was served, we took the bonus quiz, and were delighted to see the nerds among us stumble over some of the more difficult questions. But like the rest of the kit, the quiz was well-targeted toward the middle of its audience, so enough of us knew some answers — and enough didn’t — to keep it interesting.

I have a couple of caveats: Time to Wine provides a “sign-up sheet” and instructs ask each guest as he arrives to write down the wine he brought, the vintage, and his name. As a result, because some guests will see on the list at least some wine names, the tasting isn’t completely blind; that is, some guests will know what the wines on the table are, even if they don’t know which they are.

This was not a major roadblock for us. In fact, as host the sign-up sheet was a handy reference for me. But any geek will gripe over the fact that the kit doesn’t present clearly either a “double blind” tasting, where the only thing tasters know is the theme (in which case the host would have to fill out the sign-up sheet after the bags came off, or do it before and not participate in the competition), or a single blind tasting, where tasters know the specific wines on the table, but not which of them is being poured at the moment.

My other minor kvetch is about the poor editing of the kit’s materials. It’s important, even for novices, that a guide like this (and that costs $25) seem authoritative. So questions should be posed clearly (does the test mean per capita when it asks which country drinks the most wine?), key words like “vintner” should be spelled correctly, and instructions should not be misleading. (I’m still wondering how I’m going to find examples for the proposed tasting theme of “red chardonnay versus white chardonnay.”)

Again, though, these are nitpicks. Overall this is a delightful wine tasting kit and I’d recommend if for anyone throwing a tasting party, whether your guests are Robert Parker Jrs. or recent converts from beer. Everyone will enjoy the trip.

I gained a friend at a party last weekend thanks to an embarrassingly nerdy discussion we had about, of all things, storage. (I promise I am not usually such a dweeb at parties, but I was standing around with a handful of Internet and high tech types.) My new friend was delving deep into the intricacies of archiving film and video, which I was surprised is not as easy as copying onto a big hard drive. As she was wrapping up by citing some technologies that look promising, but haven’t been time tested, I got to thinking about wine.

“That sounds like the great cork debate,” I said. To follow my logic, click here:

And it’s true: many quality wineries have been switching to plastic stoppers and screw caps for better storage. In the case of wine, it’s to avoid cork taint, the musty-tasting degradation caused by corks that affects a lot – some say as much as 10 percent – of bottles in the market.

I’d been thinking fondly about screw tops recently, because for some reason I’ve opened a streak of corked bottles over the past few months, the latest being a 2004 Frank Family cabernet sauvignon that I paid $70 for at a fancy steak house the night before I had this conversation with the film archivist. Actually, this was the second tainted bottle of this same wine I’d tasted since February. Twice bitten, I’m beginning to think the poor Frank folks ended up with a whole shipment of bad corks. When will they finally go through them all? It leaves me with a sad feeling: how could all those beautiful grapes, and all that good will and careful winemaking, go into a bottle, only to be sealed with the kiss of death?

It seems as if synthetic stoppers would be the way to go; who would deliberately risk messing up 10 percent of her winery’s production? But the problem with plastic corks and screw-tops—along with the fact that they’re about as aesthetically appealing as a toilet bowl flapper — is that they’ve not been time tested. Like new film and video storage technology, simply because it’s innovative, nobody’s been able to test a 50 year old Chateau Lafitte stopped with a screw top versus one with a cork.

Then my new friend added another cause for thought: all plastics, she said, degrade. She’d be surprised if a plastic cork didn’t throw off by-products as it (and the wine it’s touching) aged. Even a metal screw top would probably be lined with plastic, she added, so you’d face the same problem with that option.

Since I’m not a snob or a traditionalist about wine, and since I drink most of my wine before I’d have to worry about an alternative closure failing, I’ve never had an issue with these newfangled stoppers. But now I’m rethinking. The winemaker at Sokol Blosser made me rethink even more. Write if you’re a also a nerd chemist and have something to add about my new friend’s concerns.

I put in a pretty dismal performance at my local wine store’s blind tasting last week. Out of eight mystery syrahs from the northern Rhône, my second favorite was the group’s second least favorite. Then my almost-most-disliked was the winner. It wasn’t just a case of to-each-her-own; it was as if I was wearing my taste buds backwards.
The evening was spared by Russ, my table-mate. Russ says he’s a regular attendee and indeed no seams showed on his palate. He complained of the the group’s least favorite (Bernard Burgaud’s 2004 Côte Rôtie, $60, my third favorite — doh!), “no punch.” Of the winner (Michel and Stephane Ogier’s Côte Rôtie of the same vintage, $73), he said, “loved the pepper.”

For details on the surprise take-away of the evening, click here:

Anyway, to keep the cost of the tastings down, we all bring eight of our own glasses. I purchased a 12-pack of cheapies at Costco for the occasions, thinking then when I inevitably broke one, my embarrassment wouldn’t be exacerbated by the sound of a cash register in my mind. And it’s true; the person who brings $24 Reidels to a group tasting is nothing but a show-off with bad priorities. Think about all the good wine he could have sipped from a modestly priced glass instead.

As for Russ, I noticed that his glasses were nice, sure, but not too fancy — until he picked one up and banged it against the side of the table.

Now, I’d heard about super-strong stemware made of titanium and whatnot, but I hadn’t yet seen one — in this case, a Schott Zweisel Forté — in action. I was stunned. I had the same reaction to Russ’s demonstration as that customer when Madge tells her she’s got her fingers in Palmolive dishwashing liquid: I jerked away. But the glass bounced back, shiny, delicate, and completely intact. I’d invest $10 per glass in that.

Most importantly, Russ says he likes soaking in them.

When people say “wine geek,” usually they mean it metaphorically. But sometimes the parallels between the pimply, C++ quoting nerd and the red-nosed, Frenchified wine snob are all too real. Here are nine gifts that will satisfy that special person on your list whose love of wine has taken on a certain cultish, slightly weird connotation.

Periodic Table of Wine
Poster-sized Chart of Grape Varieties ($35.00)
True wine geeks can look at this poster, which can decorate perfectly her kitchen or wine cellar, and say, “Did you know that Zinfandel is really crljenak kastelanski, an obscure Croatian grape traced by Dr. Carole Meredith, a professor and geneticist at the University of California at Davis?

PDA Cellar Database
“WineMaster” for Palm OS, from Poohbah Industries ($19.95)
In the case of the really hopeless collector, this gift will allow him to answer anywhere the question: “how many bottles of 2000 Bordeaux do you have in your cellar?” The engineer behind this handy app has kindly offered Wine Girl’s readers a 20% discount (type CPN1528992426 for the coupon on the Personal Information page during checkout at the Poohbah web store. This coupon expires December 31). Plus you can get a great-loooking gift certificate by emailing him at grand@poohbah.com.

Must-Have Reference Book
The Oxford Companion to Wine, ed Jancis Robinson ($65)
Because Master of Wine Jancis Robinson has updated her Oxford Companion to reflect all the modern, hot button issues in wine (new entries include globalization and Okanagan), even if your fanatical friend already has the last edition, she’s need this one, too.

Pervy Wine Pump
Vino Vac Wine Saver
The newly redesigned, if now slightly phallic, Vino Vac is highly recommended because (a) it really works. Personally, if I have wine leftovers (hey, it happens more often than you might think), I use this thing to pump excess air out of the bottle and then I stick it in the fridge. If it’s a red wine, I just take it out about an hour before I’m ready to drink it. Fresh as can be! And (b), even if your recipient already has the pump, if my experience is any evidence, he’ll need more of the stoppers.

Parker on your Cellie
Robert Parker Mobile($4.95 a month)
Since his early days on Compuserve, renown wine critic Robert Parker has always shown a geeky side, and internet-savvy Parkerites have long been subscribers to eRobertParker over the print (gasp!) “Wine Advocate.” Now, if they have a Java-enabled cell phone, they can access eRobertParker’s thousands of tasting notes and scores at the wine store, a restaurant, wherever. It’s like being able to dial WINE-911 and get Bob himself! Or, Parker makes it really easy to give a three-month trial gift subscription to eRobertParker.com ($29).

Girls Are Geeks Too
Red, White, and Drunk All Over, by Natalie MacLean ($23.95)
Wine Girl would be amiss if she didn’t recommend this book by the woman behind the award-winning Nat Decants. The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov says the book has a “distinctly female” perspective: “On a glassware producer’s discovery that ‘content commands shape,’ she notes, ‘But anyone who has ever bought a bra already knows that.’”

Iceless Wine Chiller
Ice Made Analog by this High-Design Cooler ($17.95)
Give one of these iceless coolers and your recipient will never look back at ice. All the dripping, splashing, melting mess of the traditional champagne bucket will, in her mind, be consigned to the romantic past of a Dorothy Parker gathering at the Algonquin. She’s chilling in style now.

Adult Themed Wine-Glass Charms
Especially the “Rich Bitch” Set ($14.99)
Normally I’m against wine-glass charms. I think they’re a little tacky, but the real problem is that I always forget to break them out and use them. When I do manage to remember, if I drink too much I not only forget which glass is mine, but which charm was mine. Was I the green bead, or the little corkscrew? These Rich Bitch charms, though, might stick. You can choose from a credit card, a convertible, Adam and Eve in an embrace, a high heel, a shopping bag, or a girl in a champagne glass. I also liked their R-rated set, which includes a little “Do Not Disturb” sign.

Chocolate-Wine Pairing Set
San Francisco Chocolate Company’s Wine Lover’s Chocolates — Six Tins
What’s a true nerd without an acne problem? This box of chocolates, each one with wine-pairing suggestions, is guaranteed to be the break-out gift of the season.

Looking for the most truly tasteless gifts for wine lovers? Click here!

1. Girl’s Legs Wine Bottle Stopper, $24.95

It’s a Playmate, In Your Chardonnay

I’ve never liked those vodka ads with hot models lounging in martini glasses. This subtext to this tchotchke devolves in the same downward ideological direction, like: I was minding my own business, enjoying my grand cru, and this stripper appeared out of nowhere, dove headfirst into my bottle, and now she’s trapped!

WineGirl Hint: If the sexism of this gift bothers you, opt for animal cruelty with this alternative:

The Blitzen Reindeer Ornament, a toasted piece of roadkill can adorn your tree:

Can Baby Say, Mama’s a Drunk?

This jumper ranks down there with those “Queer Spawn” T-shirts for pink-diaper babies.

I’m sorry, no matter how noble the theme, if it’s not legal for the underaged, and a billboard for it shouldn’t be hanging off the necks of toddlers.

I suggest as an alternate, since it provides humor at our expense and not that of our future world leaders, this “Mommy Drinks Because I Cry” baby T.

4. ENTIRE Bottle of Wine Glass, $13.95

The Wine Glass for People who Don’t Share

(Ok, so maybe we all sceretly want this one.)

Nothing says, Back off! better than this stem that holds an entire bottle of wine.

As the catalogue puts it:

“If you limit yourself to ‘just one glass’ of wine to relax, you better make it this glass!

“Giant glass goblet holds an entire bottle of your favorite vintage–it’s a wine lover’s dream come true!”

WineGirl Plus: It’s even dishwasher safe.

5. Wine Enthusiast Man of the Year and Magazine Subscription $139.95

$139.95???

Is the hole in your gift-recipient’s ego so gaping that he needs this tacky, fallacious commemorative poster to cover it? And I do mean he. Although the fine print says you can get this framed, matted monstrosity with the alternate titles “woman” or “chateau,” this faux magazine cover is a guy thing, and billed as such.

“There’s a careful 7 1/4″ x 7″ cut-out in the cover so you can slide in a photograph of your favorite wine enthusiast. Every wine lover on your list should have one.”

Don’t Tread on Me

I’m no hygiene freak, but I do think it was a sanitary idea for wineries to replace human feet with machines when it came to crushing grapes. Now the old association, which is not romantic in my book, between our lower extremities and wine is back. Available in chardonnay and pinot noir, to match any outfit, I guess.

7. Vintage Chart Tie, Yellow, $29.95

Sir, you ah..have something on your tie.

The only thing worse than wearing this tie would be looking at it to determine whether you should order the Two-Buck-Chuck ‘05 or ‘06 while reading it upside down.

And before you go…please try these great stories:
–What Wine to Serve at Thanksgiving
–WineGirlOnline’s Free Wine Tips Newsletter <--a must
– Have Wine, Won’t Travel