Sometimes, opportunity lies right in front of you. Or, if you’re Jeremy S. Walworth, it lies in your neighbor’s pile of recycling.

Jeremy hauled the wood from a broken IKEA bed frame out of his neighbor’s driveway and set about making a wine rack for his basement. With help from his daughter, he cut, sanded and glued a 60-bottle wine rack complete with bottle slots. Nice wine rack hack! Wine and family bonding taken to a new, productive level.

Now that’s some wine aged sur lit.

More wine DIY: corks as Christmas tree ornaments

In a profile of Aida Batlle, a coffee grower in El Salvador, The New Yorker blows the lid on coffee’s imitation of wine. Check out all the ways how these above-average Joes are threatening us now:
* using word “terroir”
* rise of estate labeling
* a focus on harvesting good fruit
* existence of a barista guild certification
* frequent use of blind tastings, known as “cuppings”
* stating that coffee pros like their coffee served slightly cooler because it releases more aromatics at a lower temperature
* obsessing over gadgets, such as a $100 burr grinder

Hey, “coffee experts,” back off! We wine geeks already have all these areas covered. And on the iPad version of the story, they even have the gall to offer an instructional video of how to brew coffee. Come on, we know that wine has a monopoly on “how to serve” videos on the web! Next thing you know, “coffee experts” will be spitting their java into a Jets bucket!

One thing they dare bring to blind tasting is rigor. Get this: in the Cup of Excellence program, “judges must be able to describe samples the same way when they are presented at different tables, in different orders.” And the story’s protagonist nails her own coffee when a cheeky barista in Red Hook tried to trick her in a cupping!

But don’t worry, wine geeks, we still have one thing they don’t: point scores! Yes, I pity the “coffee experts,” since they are not able to substitute a subjective experience with the false pretense of objectivity–we still have that one covered!

I’m going out on a limb here and say that women don’t really want their wine in perfume-shaped wine bottles.

But that’s just what the grappa distillery Mazzetti d’Altavilla is making with their new “Essentia Vitae.” Here’s what someone who hailed it as the packaging innovation of the week had to say.

“While perfume-inspired wine may be an acquired taste, Essentia Vitae goes further than most to connect to female consumers. Its perfume-like packaging should break through the crowded product assortments that can often confound shoppers.”

Argh, those crowded product assortments confusing women wine shoppers! Apparently the wines come in three different flavors/aromas/varieties: No. 4 Ruche – jasmine scent, No. 6 Malvasia – rose scent, and No. 8 Moscato – violet scent. What that exactly means is not clear–are they for drinking or dousing?

My bold prediction: these will go the way of Beringer’s White Lie and the French WineSight. Dammit, marketers, gendered approaches to marketing are best left to important things like razors blades and deodorants!

Search for this wine at retail

I got a catalogue in the mail the other day from something called Napa Style. I don’t know if it’s 100% from Napa or just sort of a Fred Franzia Napa style. But they had the item shown above listed as “big bottle wine hurricanes.” Yes, empty bottles, albeit big bottles, priced $99 – $249!

How hard is it to cut a wine bottle and make your own “hurricanes” with big bottles left over from your last party or gotten from a restaurant? Not hard, it turns out. Check out the video below for details. Or, to save you ten minutes of your life, score (no points!) the bottle with a tool like this, then pour boiling water from a tea pot over the score line and the glass has a super clean break, apparently.

Voila. Now, if you like this sort of decor and feel a tiny bit artsy-craftsy, you can spend the $249 on bottles that actually have wine in them, not candles.

Have you ever been cycling home and thought, “Gee, I’d love to stop at that wine store but I have nowhere to put a bottle because I do not have a backpack or paniers or a basket or anything!” Well, this clever little gizmo available on Etsy will solve all your problems! And if you are commuting in New York City and a cab cuts you off, well, that wine bottle might just come in handy too.

One caveat: probably not great for Champagne. Unless you are seeking to turn the cork into a projectile.

When do the companion baguette holders come out for handlebars that turn your bike into a sort of Longhorn?

Hat tip: bottlenotes.

Rob, a site reader living in China, sent in these photos. He says he doesn’t drink Chinese wine (“for obvious reasons”) but this bottle was a birthday present (“tasted terrible and was definitely not made of 100% juice”).

Still, are the Chinese trying to send anglophone customers messages via corks a la fortune cookies? If so, cute idea but they may want to use a service other than Google Translate. Oh wait, maybe “You Fat in bed” sounds better? Hmm, not really.

We were chatting during the taping and he told me that almost authored “Wine for Dummies” way back when. He had already written “Macs for Dummies,” which, if I were the publisher, I would never have even assigned since Macs are so intuitive. But it just goes to show what I know since the book was a tremendous success (he says that his current house is “the house that Dummies built”). The publisher wanted to continue the empowering, demystifying, how-to series and approached him and writing a wine book. He admitted that he knew little about wine but the publisher still wanted him on board. Ultimately, his schedule didn’t permit his involvement. (And “Wine for Dummies,” written by Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, went on to become a huge success.)

Spying a small wine fridge in his family room, I asked Pogue if was looking forward to any particular wine over the holidays. He admitted that while wine is his drink of choice, he’s still “trying to learn what to drink, when.” He was shocked when a friend recently tut-tutted that she would never drink a certain wine with a certain food. He said he wants to learn more about the cultural aspects of drinking and once extensively searched online and came up empty handed. “And I thought that Google could find anything!” he said with a touch of irony.

After our taping ended, in true style of a renaissance man, he sat down behind the grand piano and started belting out some Christmas songs. Kristina, an excellent singer who also appears in the CNBC video, sang along. A great duo!

Who said wine isn’t a contact sport? In an attempt to break a world record, Harry Constantinescu, sommelier at the St. Regis Hotel in Atlanta, had a crack and a zing at sabering 22 bottles of Champagne in 60 seconds last Friday.

“When diving in the waters near France,” Yaccarino writes, “Cousteau and his crew found a sunken ship full of wine jars over 2,200 years old! They tasted the wine. Alas, it was bitter.”

My seven-year-old son thought it was cool to taste something outrageously old, even if it was “bitter.” (Apparently, Cousteau’s comment at the time was that it was “a poor vintage.”) Here’s the same 1952 discovery in another book, for grown-ups:

“[Cousteau] checked his depth gauge. Two hundred and fifty feet. … He tripped his reserve valve to give himself an extra five minutes. … And there it was. Looking like an object in a museum … an amphora lay half buried on the slope in front of him. With the last measure of his strength, Cousteau pulled the amphora free of the bottom.”

Funny we get the tasting notes in the kids’ book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any video from on-board the Calypso. But I’m sure it was captured in the ABC series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”

Last fall, my younger brother, Conrad, sailed from France to Brazil. By himself. In a race. On a 20 foot boat.

He set off from Brittany, where, aged 25, he was living in a used electrician’s van. He sailed about ten days to Madeira where the fleet stopped for fresh supplies before setting off again for Brazil. However, the degree of difficulty was raised for him when he lost one of his solar panels, and had to choose between the long-distance radio or the GPS. Needless to say, he kept the GPS. But that meant that he only talked to a few freighter ship captains over the twenty days from Madeira to Recife, Brazil.

When he crossed the equator he had a half bottle of “some cheap cava” that he uncorked to celebrate. He said he was more concerned about it being small and light than being good. But that said, it was “absolutely fantastic.”

The video of him toasting the boat and King Neptune is above. (To clarify, we are half-brothers and he was raised in New Zealand, which explains his jubilation of about being “home” again in the Southern Hemisphere.) You can check out his site and read about his preparations for his 30,000-mile around-the-world race that he starts next year. Hopefully he’ll have some nice bubbly to celebrate the end of that accomplishment.

Today’s summer wine factoid: Nomacorc, a purveyor of plastic wine closures that require a corkscrew to remove, was the brainchild of a Belgian businessman who made a fortune manufacturing extruded plastics, including pool noodles. So if you’ve been floating around in the pool this summer and sensed a connection, you’re right.

In related news, plastic closures were the closure that consumers disliked the most by a two-to-one margin over all other closures in our recent poll.

On a somewhat related note, check out the profile of Brett Ottolenghi–alternately known as “the truffle kid” or “Hamleg”–in the current issue of the New Yorker (subscription req’d). When he was 13, Ottolenghi started selling white truffles online and later ran the business from his dorm room. Now 25, he “specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the near-banned,” which includes foie gras, truffles, caviar, saffron, vinegars, cinnamon, oils, salts, and ham. He sells them to the 375 Las Vegas chefs he claims to know on a first-name basis.

Rather than scaring you about the Iberian lynx, some cork enthusiasts have put out a video to try to save…foxes? Foxes and forests? Bottles sporting wood? Something like that. I am confused.

Have you ever thought, “Gee, I’d love to drink this whole bottle of wine–but not right out of the bottle since that’s not classy–and I don’t want to get up from the couch to do so.”

Then the inventors of the supersized, Kotula’s giant wine glass had you in mind! It fits an entire bottle in the glass, right up to the rim. Be sure to check out the hilarious video. (That’s also a party trick you can perform with some of the enormo glasses from Riedel or Bottega del Vino.)

A downside: you sure need a lot of Wine Away if it’s full of red wine and gets knocked over.

Related: “Big glasses make you drink more”
Thanks, Leah!

The world wine glut just found a new category of consumer: cows.

A farmer in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley is feeding her cattle red wine for the 90 days before slaughter. According to the Vancouver Sun, Janice Ravndahl of Sezmu Meats stumbled on the idea while watching chef Gordon Ramsey feed beer to pigs on his show, The F Word. Because she thought her Angus would get bloated from the carbonation in beer, she started feeding her cows a liter of local red wine a day, sometimes mixed in with their food, sometimes straight. Here’s how the cows reacted:

“When the cows first drink the wine, it’s like ‘what is this?’” says Ravndahl.

“But once they have it, they’re happy to have it again. They moo at one another a little more and seem more relaxed. There are a few that lap it up out of the pail. After they’ve had it for a while, when they see us coming with the pitchers, they don’t run, but they come faster than usual.”

A little more relaxed? And they seem to “talk to each other”? Hey now–I think someone is asking for a candlelit stall for two in the back.

Why do it? Local chefs attest to the subtly more complex flavor. One even remarked that it came “pre-marinated.” If in boeuf bourguignon, the meat cooks in the wine, boeuf a la canadienne must put the wine in the beef first.