New Screw Cap Cork

You knew it had to happen. The world’s largest producer of cork, Amorim from Portugal, and O-I have created the HELIX. This innovative wine closure/bottle combination is an interesting mutation of the cork/screw cap concept. It’s a 100 % natural wine cork stopper with threads on the portion that goes into the bottle, and threads on the inside of the bottle opening for the cork to screw into. The top of the cork has a mushroom cap similar to what closes Sherry bottles so it can be, gripped, opened and reclosed. No corkscrew required! Potential concerns might be consumers trying to pull or push the cork out and into the bottle thus destroying the seal. Sadly, there’d be no ceremonial “pop” of a cork being expelled from a bottle either. 

Wine Placement in Tasting

When tasting many wines at a tasting, where a wine actually sits in the lineup can affect your perception of it. This is a common problem. Say you’ve just tasted an absolutely fabulous wine and the one that follows is only good. Chances are you’ll perceive it as less than “good” merely because you’ve set a mental benchmark with the great wine and basically conditioned your palate to greatness. By the same token, if you’ve just tasted a very simple or mediocre wine and the one following is just good, you’ll probably think it’s actually better than it is. It’s only human nature to compare and cleaning your palate between wines with water or a bite of dry biscuit or bread can help reduce this effect. 

BYOB

Some restaurants offer a BYOB or “Bring Your Own Bottle” program, allowing you to bring a wine from home to accompany your meal and only be charged a “corkage fee”. From many accounts, it doesn’t seem to be working well. Why? To begin, most restaurants that offer it don’t advertise such worth a darn. They’d much prefer you buy wine off their wine list instead where they’ll make a decent buck from their markups. Perhaps, customers feel cheap or embarrassed by wanting to bring a wine from home rather than purchasing the eateries’. Finally, if diners do take advantage of this program, rather than bring special, rare, or old vintages that mean something to them, many tend to bring bottles where the corkage fee equals or surpasses the wines’ value. Kind of ludicrous!

Evolution of Wine Enjoyment

There was a time not too long ago when if you wanted some wine you simply uncorked a bottle and poured yourself a glass. Today there are more closures in wine bottles than Trump has hotels and glassware has become a science, not merely something to sip your vino out of. There are special wine chillers, aerators, vacuum utensils to suck air out of bottles, inert gas in cans to preserve wine, thermometers, specially designed carafes and God knows what else to supposedly enhance your wine experience. In fact, the act of preparing a wine to sip and save it seems to have become more important than the sipping itself. It makes me wonder if we’ve become much too anal and cerebral about the enjoyment of the nectar of the grape.