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S01E03 | Opening and Pouring

Written By: ClassicWines.com Team on Thursday, March 22, 2007

Brian Freedman:Welcome to ‘The Classic Wines Minute’ brought to you by classicwines.com; I am Brian Freedman. Now, today instead of tasting the wines we are going to be discussing how you serve a wine, because there is all this ritual associated with it and it is not only so that we can look pretentious and fancy at what we are doing but it is really so that we can also enhance our enjoyment of the wine as well. Now, there is a lot of confusion when it comes to this. There are issues of the wine glasses that you use; hopefully you are using wine glasses but we will get there later. There is the question of how you open up you wine? How do you serve it? How do you pour it? Really, how does this whole ordeal work when it comes to that span of time between getting your bottle of the rack and actually getting it into your friend’s livers.

Now, the process begins with deciding with how we are going to get this foil capsule off of the wine bottle. Couple of ways we can do this; there are these fancy little gadgets, this will cost you a couple of bucks. It actually comes with these rabbit style cork-screws and these are great, because you can just put them around the top and spin it around and the top of the capsule just pops off.

I personally prefer to use the old fashioned waiter’s corkscrew, and I like that because it allows us to cut underneath the lip here, okay. If we cut above here like something like this does then we run the risk of getting all kinds of wine down in there, right. Also, the wine is going to touch whatever foil is left there when you are pouring it and that could actually affect the flavor.

So, personally for reasons of taste and hygiene, I prefer using just a plain old knife. Now, again they sell a number of different kinds of these. I don’t know if you can see it on this camera but it is serrated, okay, and that makes it a whole lot easier to really just get below the capsule and sort of tear it off. Now, this one is giving us a bit of a hard time. Some of them actually have, believe it or not, some sort of glue on them. Of course, here we have chosen one with glue on it. We are very, very slick here today on ‘The Classic Wines Minute’.

Now, don’t worry if something like that happens, it is bound to occur once in a while and remember it is alcohol we are talking about here, it is nothing to really get bent out of shape over. But, as you can see we actually have a nice clean cut here. So, it is really not going to get in our way, and the wine is not going to touch it. Finally, after that we have a couple of options.

Now, when it comes to getting the cork out most people don’t have something like this at home. I prefer it, I feel like I have a little more control, but these days it seems a lot of people have these rabbit style cork-screws. They can rage anywhere from $30-$100. I think I saw a platinum-coated one the other day. A little bling with your wine never hurt, right, or it is tacky depends on who you ask. Now, with these -- I love these, because when I am running a wine event or am at someone’s house and we are opening up a lot, you really just position it right over the top, you pop it down and up it comes, just like that, okay, done. You don’t have to worry about spilling anything it is all taken care of.

Now, after that, this drives me crazy in restaurants. Biggest mistake, when waiters or Sommelier or usually Sommelier know a little better, they rest the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass. There’s cooties on this thing, or maybe not cooties but they have been sitting in the cellar and you don’t need that, your lips are going to be here, you probably wouldn’t lick the cap, right. So, don’t even think about doing that when you are at home. Just keep it a little bit above the glass and you just can pour it in there, okay, and you always get just a little bit of a taste of a pour there, alright. We have gone over that in previous episodes, how you taste wine that whole ritual, so for more information on that, check out that episode. But we are not going to go there today.

Now, you can see that we have four different kinds of glasses here. This is a Classic Wine Glass, both of these. Personally, I prefer this one, it is a little thinner around the lip, okay that means you are tasting less with the glass, texturally it is not interfering with you enjoyment of the wine, but the key here is that we have sense, okay we have talked about before, you never want to hold it by the bowl so you definitely want stems. If we would pour the wine in this, it is not so elegant, we are getting our fingerprints around it, it is just going to change our experiencing of the wine.

This is a Classic Champagne Flute. We don’t want this for wine because it is not going to get the wine enough of the space in there to really develop those aromas that we look for, and remember over 90% of what we taste is actually what we smell, so by using a Champagne Flute for wine, we are really limiting our enjoyment of it.

Finally, and this is a major issue, I don’t care if you are pouring a $10 bottle of Burgundy, alright, and they sell some pretty inexpensive Burgundies out there, but if you point a $500 one, okay the point is, don’t make a big deal out of it, there is nothing worst than someone who comes out or they sell it at home when they have a crowd there or they have a restaurant and they are telling everyone with a near shot, oh do you see my 61 (05:06)Chateau Beaumont, I paid $800 for it (05:09) voice channel he goes up and it really ruins any chance anyone had a big point of this. Play it cool, alright, relax, if the wine is that great people will know it will speak for itself. Your job is just to serve it properly and let everyone enjoy it as much as they possibly can.

Well, until next time I am Brian Freedman, this has been ‘The Classic Wines Minute.’ Thanks for joining us.

Total Duration: 6 minutes

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