D is for Decanting

Decanting. It is one of the many wine terms that get tossed around so people can feel like they know more about wine than they really do.

Have you ever been at a party and your host offers some red wine, and there is always that one jackass who is all 'You can't serve that, it has to breathe!'

First, punch that guy in his (or her) smarmy face.

Next, decanting is not as clear-cut as people think. For one, you can decant both reds and whites. Or neither. You can decant new or old wines, but they should be done for different amounts of time to avoid oxidation. I guess wine rusts if you leave it out too long?

Anyway, wine takes on different qualities once the bottle is opened. It subtly changes the longer it sits out. Now, I am not advanced enough to actually understand or even recognize these changes, but 'wine people' insist it is a thing.

If you do choose to decant, poor slowly, experiment with time frames, and 'air' on the side of caution. Get it? Air?

Whatever. I thought it was funny.

C is for Corkscrew

Obviously, a Corkscrew is pretty important for drinking wine.

Let me tell you a story...

Once upon a time, a young, impressionable wine drinker desperately needed a glass of wine after a hard day of work.

She went to the package store and spent her last $10 before payday on some fermented grape swill. She took it home, got out a plastic cup, and grabbed her corkscrew.

This piece of crap corkscrew from the dollar store bent and broke instead of opening the bottle of wine.Our heroine sat on the linoleum and cried.

Then, she grabbed a knife and stabbed the cork into her wine bottle. It kindof worked, but also broke the top of the bottle. Now there was both cork bits and glass shards in the bottle, turning the wine from mediocre to deadly.

In a fit of madness-induced MacGuyver-ing, our heroine strained her wine through a coffee filter and drank it anyway. Clearly, she was not making very good life choices that day all around.

Moral of the story: Have a good corkscrew. I suggest the re-chargeable electronic ones, but if that is out of your price range (mine was a gift from my boss after I told her the above story, actually,) get a decent manual one. They are like, less than five bucks. It is an investment you will be glad of.

In a pinch, you can use the tiny corkscrew function on your brother's jacknife, but that could end in a half a damn bottle of wine down the front of your blouse. That, however, is the story for another day.

B is for Barrel Aged

Barrel Aged means the wine sat around in a barrel for a while. (Duh.) When wine is made, after the initial fermentation, and after the largest particles have been removed, it has to age for some time, or else it tastes like grape juice that you left in the back of your fridge for too long.

Try this some time: Mix some Welch's with some vinegar. Drink. Or better, make your dumbass roommate drink. This is what un-aged wine tastes like.

There are different ways to age wine, but one of the best known methods is barrel aging. Another term for it is 'Oaking' because the barrels are frequently made of oak. (Again, duh.)

Oaking the wine gives it a woodsy, vanilla quality and allows the wine to oxygenate slowly. This gives it a smooth finish that sounds desirable to me. I am not sure what the other options for wine finishes are off the top of my head. Rough? Sharp? Spicy? Probably something like that.

Anyway, barrel aged wines are highly sought after, with the most expensive wines in the world all being oaked.

If you want to know a whole lot more, read this six-page pdf. I am sure there is more information than that out there too, but seriously, if you want more than six pages about oak barrels and how they relate to wine, you probably should not be reading my blog to start with.

A is for Aroma

Aroma is a wine term that basically just means the scent when a wine is sniffed. You know all those snooty wine tasting people who insist you sniff the wine and not just drink it like a pleb? They are looking for the Aroma.

I hope his taste in wine is better than his taste in clothes...

The aroma can also be tasted through the olfactory effects when the wine is drank. Part of tasting anything comes from the smell of it, so the same is true for wine.

Now, if you want to be extra snobby, you can insist on the difference between Aroma and Bouquet. The Aroma, in that case, is the scents present in the wine specifically from the grapes. There are different scents associated with different varieties of grape. I will not go into them now because... reasons.

(Those reasons are that I am lazy and this is supposed to be a quick and dirty post.)

Bouquet, on the other hand, is the term for the scents in wine derived from the chemical reactions as the wine ages and ferments. They develop over time.

A few fun facts about Aromas:

There are hundreds of different possibilities.

Warm or room-temperature wines give off more aromas than chilled wines, because science.

When detecting Aroma in wine, sniff the wine, then swirl, then sniff again. Different aromas can be determined before and after the swirling, again, because science.

If you are really interested in knowing more about Aromas and the types, there is a very cool in-depth resource here.

A to Z Blog Month

So, first of all, I am back.

I was pregnant, so I haven't written in a very long time.

Now I can drink again (Woo!) so I am back.

Second, I am going to try to do A to Z blog month, so I will post every day in April, on a topic going through the alphabet. They will all be booze-related, and will hopefully get me back into the blogging game.