Dr Vino's wine blog

Today is the deadline for tax filing. But soon enough, we’ll all be getting those rebate checks for $600! Yay! Why spend this economic stimulus on, say, ten days of health insurance premiums (grrr) when you could spend it on wine!?!

So if you could spend your whole rebate on wine, how would you do it? A case of $50 bottles (not including sales tax)? Five cases of $10 wine? Or the cork on a gold encrusted double magnum of champagne?

Hit the comments with your thoughts!

(image)

SPIT: Food and wine gone awry
Cabernet and wedding cake, Cabernet and mac n cheese, pulled pork and Burgundy – great comments, and they’re yours! Check out all of the great and wonderful food pairings that knocked your world.

SPIT: the hippocampus!
Wine drinkers have a 10 percent smaller hippocampus than those who drink spirits or beer, researchers say! But I thought “Red wine antioxidants protect hippocampal neurons against ethanol-induced damage“! Ugh, my brain hurts.

SPIT: Chinese wine!
“Millions of Chinese will be disappointed by their first taste of wine” is Jancis Robinson’s assessment of home-grown wines in China. Reporting on a recent trip, she, too, was “disappointed” by the “chemical and occasionally rotten odours” in the wines and general lack of progress with the industry over the past five years. [FT]

SIPPED: Holy wine
In Manchester they may go for Fairtrade wine, but Craig Heffley and Seth Gross of Wine Authorities, a wine retailer in Durham, NC, have another goal in mind for the Duke Chapel: tasty. They plan to start selling a 3L bag-in-box next summer for use in the Eucharist. [Durham News]

SPIT: drinking wine
“The 2006 Insolia from Feudo Principi di Butera…can be pleasurably inhaled for minutes.” Going easy on the hippocampus, was he? [NYT]

SIPPED: understatement
Talk about an impossible food wine pairing! Wine critic and blogger Peter Liem visits a sake festival in Japan and eats live shrimp: “My first two passed complacently, but a third, a female full of salty-sweet roe, twitched a little as I decapitated her with my fingers.” What’s his title for this juicy posting? “Niigata Prefecture.” Tony Bourdain, your job is safe–for now!–until Peter recruits a headline writer from Gawker… [peterliem]

image

“High-tech electronic noses and tongues are rivaling the capabilities of their human counterparts and may someday prove more valuable to food and beverage companies than living, breathing expert tasters,” writes the Washington Post.

Have your say with a caption for the above image!

Related: “Scents and Sensibility,” The New Yorker, 3/10/08
“Who’s threatening us now? Robots!” Dr. V

We saw the still version before but now we’ve got a four minute video clip from the outdoor, communal spas in Japan where you can take a bath in red wine, sake, coffee, green tea and even chocolate! (Do them all to complete the cycle.) The wine and coffee baths reputedly have anti-aging properties. A pale British reporter has the story–and provides a brief scare when he threatens to get in the bath himself.

(reading this in a feed reader? Click here for the video.)

“It’s no wonder Britain’s middle classes are getting wasted,” Trish Groves, of the British Medical Journal, told the BBC.

Why? Could it be the economic slowdown? Posh & Becks living in America? The fact that the Grammy for best album went to Herbie Hancock instead of Amy Winehouse?

No, it’s the 750 ml bottle!! “It’s all too tempting to finish the bottle there and then to avoid waste,” Ms Groves continued. Those frugal Brits are plunging themselves into the abyss just so they don’t waste 250 ml of wine. Someone airdrop them some of those vacu-vin stoppers!! And just keep them away from magnums!! Or giant bottles on the street!

Related: “Big wine glasses make you drink more: poll”
(image)

Peter Liem found this gem of a video (54 secs). Funny, this is the EXACT SAME way that I open my 1996 Cristal! What a coinkydink! Valentine’s Day grandstanders can really impress with this method of opening–and have two bottles open to boot.

“Oversized wine glasses in British pubs cause worry among pols, health officials,” blared a headline in the NY Daily News. I have to admit that when I saw that, I feared that there had been a Riedel war in a London pub, perhaps a jousting match with broken stems.

But it turns out that “big glasses” are being blamed on binge drinking! Roll the tape:

“The glasses are larger and the wines are a lot stronger. It’s a minefield for anyone trying to keep tabs on what they’ve had,” said Srabani Sen, head of Alcohol Concern, a charity.

While binge drinking is no doubt unfortunate and apparently has risen to worrying levels in Britain, are big glasses to blame? Have your say in the latest poll!

poll now closed
UPDATE: now with intel from London in the comments – Golly and StuckatLGW
Image: John Joh, with permission

This seen by our undercover operatives at Pottery Barn: a bag of 55 wine bottle corks for $14. Not a wine stain on any of them! Stumped by why they were being sold (home winemakers wandering through the store perhaps?), our agent then spotted a square vase filled with the display corks. A good look, but a little sterile since the corks were mere props.

Just think that 55 bottles of $10 wine is only $550 — pleasure, memories, and, yes, corks, included. Then you can apply the $14 saved toward the cool vase. I’m looking forward to the bag of 55 screwcaps, due out soon.

What do you do with your used corks?

Related:
-Reduce, reuse…recork?
-13,500 bottles of wine ARE the wall
-To Cork or not to Cork, a giveaway

Had a bad wine experience lately? At a shop or a restaurant or at home? And you don’t have a blog of your own to bitch about it? Consider this your open mic thread and let us know your wine disappointments. Hopefully we can collectively offer some advice or suggestions–or just laugh with you to ease the pain.

Vent! Rant! Bring it on!

(Image, cropped, resized)