The Wine Cellar Blog» Bordeaux

Top Five Wine Gifts for 2010

admin — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 13:12:15 +0000

1) The Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator:

Tired of decanting wine and waiting for an hour for your wine to be just right? Well, the Vinturi Wine Aerator is quickly supplanting the old decanter and wine funnel routine. Not only does it take less time to "open up" your wines, now you can decant as needed or by the glass. Vinturi makes aerators for both red and white wines. Traditionalists might be in an uproar, but if you're dealing with a crabby oenophile, just let them do a taste test. The Vinturi Wine Aerator outperforms in wine tasting after wine tasting, its effect is unmistakable. However, this wine tool is used to best effect on wines that need aeration (see this link for an explanation of the practice of wine aeration). For one-hand operation get the optional Vinturi Tower. It should also be noted that the wine aerator has a tendancy to overflow if you're not paying attention and to drip when not in use, another reason to get the Tower or the Deluxe Gift Set. Price: Under $40. 2) The Oster 4207 Electric Wine-Bottle Opener:

The Oster 4207 Electric Wine-Bottle Opener is true wine opening for dummies. There's no trick or technique for removing the cork, it's push-button simplicity. Often wine gadgets can be intimidating, especially wine openers, but this corkscrew won't make you look like an idiot and it can open most wine bottles. However, what makes it simple and easy to use is also its weakness. This wine opener is electronic, so it needs to be charged after opening 30 bottles. It has cordless operation, but its recharging base takes up counter space. It may also have trouble with some artificial corks, not removing them from the bottle necessarily, but extracting it from the corkscrew afterwards. Efforts to remove the cork may break it, but this wine opener is cheap enough to replace quickly. Price: Under $25 3) The Nuance Wine Finer:

At first blush, the Nuance Wine Finer may seem like just another Vinturi Wine Aerator copycat, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's an effective wine aerator (especially if you trust the recommendations of Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen), but it's also 4 wine tools in one. Danish designers combine an aerator, filter, non-spill pourer, and stopper into one do-it-all instrument the size of a fountain pen. Just insert the Nuance Wine Finer into your bottle and pour. Wine flows through 32 aeration vents while an inner stainless steel screen filters out sediments and cork. Stand your bottle upright and the pourer catches any drips. Top your Wine Finer with the stopper to enjoy a glass later. Wine aeration without the mess, one-hand operation without a tower, wine filtration without extra equipment...and at a lower price, the Vinturi better watch its back. Price: Under $30. 4) Grandi Vini: An Opinionated Tour of Italy's 89 Finest Wines:

It might be overly ambitious to try to distill the very varied and complex Italian wine landscape down to the 89 best, but Joe Bastianich is clearly an ambitious guy. Once best known as the partner of chef Mario Batali and the son of chef Lidia Bastianich, both tv stars, this increasingly influential restaurateur now owns 20 restaurants throughout the United States and 3 wineries in Italy as well as several wine and food shops (including the hugely successful Eataly, Manhattan's new Italian food Disneyland). Grandi Vini is not for novices, for an introduction to Italian wine, Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy, by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, is a good choice. Grandi Vini should start more than a few well-lubricated arguments. Sassicaia and not Ornellaia? Fontanfredda and not Vietti? And why are there only three wines from Joe's beloved Friuli? Is Brunello still Brunello? These are questions which deserve to be argued, Italian-style, with lots of shouting and hand-waving, or possibly contemplated with a glass of one of Mr. Bastianich's own wines in hand. Price: Under $25 5) Riedel 'O' Cabernet/Merlot/Bordeaux Stemless Wine Glasses (Set of 2):

As Featured in "O" The Oprah Magazine (April 2007), the Riedel Stemless "O" Wine Glasses are the newest revolution in glassware. Founded in 1756, Austria’s Riedel Crystal is the world’s premier manufacturer of wine glasses for the fine wine connoisseur. However, these wine tumblers are part of the company’s first attempt at producing a lower priced wine glass for casual entertaining. Like Riedel’s prestigious Vinum series of glasses, Riedel "O" tumblers are specifically designed to enhance the flavors and aromas of a particular grape varietal. The only difference is that the tumblers are missing their stems, and they are machine made of lead-free crystal, making them slightly less delicate to handle, more modern in appearance, and easier to fit in smaller cabinets, mini bars, picnic baskets, and the dishwasher. Price: Under $25.

This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

The Wine Cellars at Corsham – A Literal Liquid Gold Mine

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:37:00 +0000

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". Documented wine storage conditions along with provenance is vital to maintaining a wine's value. A wine known to have crossed the Atlantic twice is likely to raise a much lower price at auction than one that has moved only once in its life, from chateau to a reliably cool wine storage facility. Other than the trip to Corsham itself, many of the wines at Corsham Cellars have moved only a few yards between different owners’ stacks in the wine vault, either through sales at auction, via merchants, or from one customer to another. The caverns are 100 ft underground resulting in a constant temperature of about 13.5 deg C/56.3 deg F. They can be reached only by two heavily guarded, half-mile shafts, one of them serviced by a small, lumbering hydraulic-powered train that transports wine in and eventually out of the cellars. Many clients like to visit their wine to check its condition. They have to walk down 157 steps, carrying an emergency underground kit (i.e. gas mask and flashlight since the property is still officially classified as a mine) to get to the heart of the cellar. They can inspect the security measures if they choose, including motion-sensor beams used to protect bank vaults. As buyers become more and more concerned about authenticity and the precise fill level in bottles before a sale (the lower it is the warmer the wine has probably been kept), or if they simply don't care for a trip to Wiltshire to check on their investment, there are three photographic studios underground so that high-quality pictures of the wine can be taken at any time and sent to the client's desktop. And should they have a special occasion to celebrate, customers can ask for a crate or even single bottle to be sent anywhere in the world to impress their guests. Corsham Cellars already stores around 5 million bottles of fine wine, some worth thousands of dollars each. It's the size of 20 football fields with tons of room for expansion. That's good because with 2009 Bordeaux promising to be a particularly excellent vintage and lucrative markets booming in Asia, they'll need it.

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This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

Empress Josephine’s Wine Cellar

admin — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:01:29 +0000

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. When Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie (aka Empress Josephine) died in 1814, she left a heap of unpaid bills and a golden legacy to social historians. Marie-Josephe-Rose, was among other things, a great connoisseur and collector of clothes, and an innovative gardener and botanist. The written inventory of her final possessions at her chateau west of Paris has inspired studies and exhibitions on subjects as varied as the fashion trends and gardening styles of the early 19th century. Josephine was also a celebrated hostess and, although not a great drinker, a great collector of wine. The official inventory of her possessions at her death includes more than 13,000 bottles of wine from all over the world, from Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal as well as South Africa and Hungary. The empress also kept hundreds of bottles of rum from her native Martinique, which she used in rum punches and served at dinner parties in gilded bowls. Josephine's chambermaid described her as a "very sober woman." She was partial to very sweet wines including champagne, but drank it all with moderation – like Napoleon. The Emperor Napoleon's favorites were Burgundy and Champagne, but he also grew fond of South African wines during his time in exile on Saint Helena, the South Atlantic island where he died in 1821 at age 52 – not far from Cape Town. Study of Josephine's 1814 "wine list" reveals something that may seem unsurprising but was, at the time, extraordinary. Almost half of her bottles and barrels came from vineyards around Bordeaux, little known chateaux that later would become some of the greatest names in wine: Latour, Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion. Was the Empress Josephine the cause of the great switch in French wine tastes which allowed the vineyards of Bordeaux, and especially the great chateaux of the Medoc, to emerge by the mid-19th century as the most prized wines in France and the world? This is one of the subjects explored in an entertaining exhibition, La Cave de Josephine (Josephine's Cellar), which has started at the Chateaux de Malmaison, where Josephine lived for the last 15 years of her life, and died in June 1814, aged 50. The exhibition, which will move to Germany and Italy next year, also examines other changes in the art de vivre of the French nobility which followed the fall of the monarchy. Before the Revolution, an aristocratic French dinner-party was a kind of immense, stand-up buffet in which all dishes were served at once. Wine glasses were kept on trays by servants and topped up as required. After the revolution, France gradually adopted the "Russian" style, now universal, of serving different, sit-down courses one after another. Wine glasses began, to be placed permanently on the table. These changes were driven partly by the post-Revolutionary lack of legions of low-paid servants. France had also finally cracked the "industrial secret" of how to make crystal wine glasses, something previously known only to the British.

This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog