Wine Service
What do you really need to serve wine at the table with style? There are on the market any number of devices, gadgets, glasses, decanters, thermometers, filters and other wine-related paraphernalia which are fun to own. But to enjoy wine, all you really need are some good glasses, a serviceable corkscrew and a decent decanter.
Glasses
Keep in mind that the wine is more important than the glass and you won’t go wrong when it comes to choosing what you are going to drink out of. There are many beautiful glasses on the market – etched crystal, ornate stemmed, gilded and tinted in fanciful colors. Avoid them. They may look good on the table or in your glass cabinet, but they will ultimately detract from your enjoyment of the wine.
The watchword in selecting wine glasses is simplicity.
What you need is a plain, well-shaped glass with a long enough stem so that your hand doesn’t have to touch the bowl (and warm up the wine) and a curved shape that captures and intensifies the wine’s bouquet.
Elegant glasses have been designed that will show the faults in wines as well as those that flatter the wines. It all hinges on where the wine actually comes in contact with your tongue which registers various tastes in different parts. An Austrian company named Riedl has designed 24 glasses, each with a specific wine type in mind.
A well-equipped household needs only three shapes. For the starting wine drinker you can even make do with a single glass.
- White wine: Clear, slim, elongated tulip shape with a longish stem, not too thick around the rim.
- Red wine: Clean, rounded bowl whose aperture is smaller than the circumference of the belly.
- Sparkling wine: Tall, slender, flute shape narrowing at the aperture. Long stem, thin glass.
- Single all-purpose glass: The standard tasting glass tulip shape, elegant bowl that narrows towards the aperture.
Corkscrews
There are many corkscrews on the market; many are inadequate
- Avoid:
- Devices with needles that involve injecting or pumping air into the wine to force out the cork. Any flaw in the bottle neck could cause it to break under the added pressure.
- Butterfly ratchet-style openers. They break down easily.
- Plastic corkscrews usually found in hotel bedrooms.
- Simple ‘l-shaped corkscrews. Too difficult to use.
- The Ah-So. A two-bladed device with a metal grip that slides down between the cork and the bottle neck. Most people end up pushing the cork into the bottle rather than extracting it.
When selecting a corkscrew, make sure that the helix (the metal spiral) is long enough (at least two inches) to pierce far enough into a Bordeaux cork to withdraw it without breakage. And if possible, it should be teflon-coated for ease of insertion. The helix should be thin, shaped in a circular spiral and not be sharp-edged. A thick helix with a cutting edge will force the cork apart and may cause it to break up.
Make sure that the point of the helix is sharp and that the blade is kept sharp at all times.