Celebrating the Holidays

With the gift giving holidays just around the corner, I figured it would be useful to offer some thoughts on gift ideas that will please anyone who loves wine. Gifts that encourage the recipient to share some wine with you are even better. Following the logic that if you give someone a bottle they can share it once but if you give them ways to find many bottles, there’s more for all of us, I’ll start with a great book idea (I've included links to most of the gift ideas below - just run your cursor over the item name).

Elyse Luray, one of the “History Detectives” on PBS, had her interest in wine cultivated by several appearances as auctioneer at our Miami Wine & Food Festival. She now shares her enthusiasm for wine in a wonderful book called Great Wines Under $20. It carries the cheery subtitle “Be the Toast of the Party Without Breaking the Bank,” and that pretty well sums up her philosophy that there is a lot of great wine out there worth discovering and it needn’t cost a fortune. At $15, the book costs even less than many of her recommended wines. Elyse writes with a sense of flair and enthusiasm without any stuffiness – this is a book that will appeal to newcomers to wine as well as those with a lot of bottles, ahem, under their belt.

One of the biggest obstacles to enjoying wine in my experience is the hassle of opening a bottle. Traditionalists argue that that a bottle with a cork is traditional and romantic, though I fail to see the romance in a broken cork at home or a wrestling match between a tough bottle and a frustrated server in a restaurant. I like screw caps on many wines, but since most bottles still have corks we all need a good corkscrew. There are dozens of corkscrew designs out there so here’s a tip: whatever design you go for, be sure the screw that goes into the cork is a wide spiral and not a narrow bore that looks like a real screw. Those auger type screws have a hard time getting a good grip on a cork so skip the unwieldy winged corkscrews and invest in a good design. My favorite is called the Screwpull and it comes in several designs, all of them easy to use without demanding a huge amount of muscle power. My favorite home model also includes a foil cutter to remove the capsule on a wine bottle, and Screwpull even makes a pocket version I’ve given to several grateful flight attendants.

Glassware is important, and as attendees saw clearly at Max Riedel’s recent symposium for the Miami Wine & Food Festival, there are a lot of options in glass design. I like the “Key to Wine Tasting” set of tumbler style glasses that Max demonstrated, but those come with a caveat.  In my non-scientific but extensive experience, people drink more wine from a tumbler style glass than from a stemmed glass. Perhaps it has to do with the feeling in the hand, the subconscious sense that it’s “just a glass,” that keeps my friends hoisting, but I’ve learned to use these glasses in small groups or, at a party, to pour less expensive wine! Our symposium was a big hit, and now I see on the Riedel website that the glass set is out of stock. There’s no question the glasses work, but you should opt as well for a few stemmed wine glasses – there is beauty in tradition.

Believe it or not, how you pour wine into your glasses makes a difference as well. The first time you pay the laundry bill for spotting a favorite tablecloth you’ll wish there were a way to avoid having droplets spill from that thick lip on most wine bottles. There is a way. In fact there are several.

The easiest and least expensive way is to purchase Drop Stop pouring spouts. These simple and inexpensive ($5 for two) Mylar discs roll up and slide into the neck of a wine bottle creating a quick, easy and drip-free spout.

Another handy type of spout aerates the wine as well as directing its drip-free flow. True Fabrications makes one type ($20) that is inserted like a stopper in a wine bottle. As you pour through the spout, a series of perforations creates airflow within the wine, rapidly oxygenating the wine as you pour. In a few seconds this mimics the effect of letting the wine breathe for an hour or two. It’s not recommended for older wines, but for young bottles (say, less than five years old), it makes a remarkable difference in the wine’s flavor and texture. The “Vinturi” is an even fancier device with the same principle of creating airflow (the process is called the Venturi Effect, hence the punny name that cracks up only wine loving physicists). It costs more and is a bit more awkward to use but in my experience it does an even better job than the pourer-style aerator. There is even one model that comes with a fancy stand that no doubt is much admired by wine-loving interior designers.

And of course, you cannot go wrong giving a wine lover a bottle of wine, can you? Well, perhaps. Not every wine lover loves every wine so it helps to know something of the recipients taste (or lack of it) in selecting a bottle. The closest thing to a never fail gift is to select something so esoteric that your recipient can’t help but be impressed by your effort, like a bottle of Madeira from his or her birth year. That can be a bit challenging to locate, so may I suggest something that has both the allure of age and the vitality of youth like a tawny port? Many producers offer tawny port in versions that are 10, 20 and 30 years old. My preference is usually for the 20 year old where you still have the fruit of a youthful wine with well balanced sweetness and lots of the nutty character that is the hallmark of a great tawny. Graham’s and Fonseca are two brands to look for and since tawny port is that rare wine that can be paired with chocolate, you can’t go wrong throwing in a bit of bar of Valhrona or some almonds as well.

No holiday wine roundup would be complete without my at least mentioning Champagne, the wine that is unabashedly my favorite. There are many sparkling wines available to us these days, but there is only one Champagne, the sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France. If it isn’t from there, it isn’t Champagne. This is the wine on everyone’s mind for New Year’s Eve but keep in mind that Champagne is first and foremost a wine. While it is the beverage of celebration par excellence, Champagne plays the same role as any wine – it goes beautifully with food and I can think of no more joyous celebration of wine and romance than having a gorgeous rosé Champagne with someone special on Christmas Eve, or for brunch on Christmas Day. A little smoked salmon and, if you can find it, a chunk of Chaource, a cheese made in Champagne, or a rich double or triple crème cheese like Explorateur or Brilliat Saverin (both are available at good gourmet markets) and you have the makings of a brilliant romantic event.

It never hurts to have a bottle or two of Champagne in your fridge for offering to friends who stop by, so don't forget an often neglected item in the wine lover's toolkit - a Champagne stopper. There are many designs but a single purpose - keeping the bubbles in your bubbly until it's all gone. True, mine tends to go before a stopper can be inserted, but if you are pouring your Champagne glass by glass, pick up a simple and inexpensive stopper. Unlike still wines, Champagne with its abundant carbon dioxide gas will maintain its freshness under a good stopper for several days. Not that I've ever been able to test the theory, of course....

There are other Champagne options as well, but I’ll save those for another post. For now, I’ll raise a glass and wish you happy holidays.