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Wine Cellar
Forget about
wine cellar equipment for their McMansions, the super rich have an underground wine vault 100ft under the Wiltshire countryside in Southern England. Formerly Eastlays mine, a source of honey-colored Bath stone, it is now Octavian Vaults's Corsham Cellars, the place where the rich and famous hoard their most precious bottles of Petrus, Lafite or Latour. It's like a bank storing liquid gold and run by one of the world’s relatively few specialist
wine storage companies. Octavian Vaults is the only place you can get a "Certificate of Pristine Storage".
The Wine Cellars at Corsham Cont'd
TagsBordeaux, Bordeaux Wine, corsham, precious bottles, provenance, security measures, southern england, storage companies, storage conditions, Wiltshire, Wine, Wine Cellar, wine cellar equipment, wine cellars, wine storage, wine storage facility, wine vault
Posted in Wine Cellar
On top of the immensity of the Olympic Winter Games, it appears the Canadians are planning an after party of equally biblical proportions. Thanks to Andre Saint-Jacques, owner of the Bearfoot Bistro and its extravagant underground
wine cellar of more than 20,000 bottles (a perennial winner of the Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence), the Champagne will flow freely for gold medal winners. And to make things even more thrilling, the Champagne bottles will be ceremoniously decapitated by Saint-Jacques himself - the Guinness World Record holder for most Champagne bottles sabred in a single minute (21).
Opening a Champagne bottle with a sword or saber by hitting the lip of the bottle (its weak point) with the blade, thereby severing the collar from the neck is called "Sabrage" and dates back to the Napoleonic Era. Napoleon was quite the lover of Champagne and is credited with saying, "Champagne! In victory one deserves it; in defeat one needs it." Saint-Jacques, also an effusive lover of the bubbly is Canada's No. 1 importer of Moet & Chandon.
Winter Games 2010, Sabrage and Salmanazars Continued
TagsAndre Saint-Jacques, Bearfoot Bistro, biblical kings, biblical proportions, Canada, Champagne, champagne bottle, champagne bottles, gold medal winners, gold medalists, guinness world record, guinness world record holder, jeroboam, jeroboams, large-format wine bottles, magnums, Moet and Chandon, Moët et Chandon, Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte, olympic games, olympic medalists, olympic winter games, sabrage, salmanazar, Whistler B.C., Wine Cellar, wine spectator, Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence, winter games 2010
Posted in Champagne, Moet and Chandon, Wine Cellar
Bordeaux wine lovers may credit the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris and Emperor Napoleon III's "Official Classification" with putting Bordeaux wine on the map. But, it turns out that his grandmother the Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte may have ignited French passion for the wine.
Prior to Josephine raising the status of Bordeaux to an elixer fit for nobility, it was seen as an inferior product suitable only for the English who had been stubborn lovers of claret, or red Bordeaux wine, for four centuries. At the time of the French Revolution, Burgundy and Champagne reigned supreme, in fact, not a single bottle of Bordeaux is known to have been kept in the
wine cellars of King Louis XVI.
Empress Josephine's Wine Cellar Continued
TagsBordeaux, Bordeaux Wine, Burgundy, Cape Town, celebrated hostess, Champagne, Château Laville Haut-Brion, Chateaux de Malmaison, Cyprus, Emperor Napoleon III, Empress Josephine, exposition universelle de paris, France, French Revolution, french wine, Germany, great drinker, Greece, Hungary, Italy, king louis xvi, Margaux, Martinique, medoc wine, Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris, Portugal, premiers cru, red bordeaux wine, saint helena, social historians, South Africa, south african wines, South Atlantic island, Spain, sweet wines, Wine Cellar, wine cellars, wine lovers
Posted in Bordeaux Wine, Champagne, Wine Cellar
Is the
wine cellar passe? Some French wine buffs believe there's a better place for storing wine, at the bottom of the sea (OMG!). A couple years ago, French winemakers began submerging hundreds of bottles of wine at a depth of 30ft in Saint-Malo Bay off the coast of Normandy. After being "massaged by the sea" for a year, it is said that "underwater whites" have more obvious wood aromas, and "submerged reds" evolve more slowly than cellared wine. Recently, Champagne house, Louis Roederer, sent divers to place several dozen bottles of its
Brut Premier at a depth of 50ft in Saint-Malo bay (hidden of course). In a year's time experts will assess if they have matured with a different or better taste than in the traditional cellars of the Champagne region. The sea may be the ideal wine cellar (i.e. constant temperatures, high humidity, no UV light), but it seems more like bored winemakers playing "Pirates of the Caribbean".
Click here for more information on
wine bottle storage.
TagsChampagne, Louis Roederer, Pirates of the Caribbean, Saint-Malo Bay, Wine Cellar, wine storage
Posted in Champagne, Wine Cellar
