Wine Trivia
Posted on December 15, 2006
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I don’t drink a lot of wine, but I do enjoy it. I also enjoy learning about wine–mostly because it makes me appear to be more sophisticated than I actually am. Here are a few bits of wine related trivia I’ve picked up recently. Perhaps these tidbits of information will help you to appear more sophisticated than you actually are, too!
- Red wine should be served slightly chilled. We’ve all heard that red wine is supposed to be served at room temperature, but this apparently goes back a few centuries ago, to a time when most rooms were kept at around 15-17 degrees Celsius (it is, evidently, difficult to keep a castle at the “modern” room temperature of 20-22 degrees). So, red wine should be chilled slightly, in order for it to taste it’s best. Having said this, it should not be chilled at much as white wine.
- The cork is slowly going out of style. It’s becoming somewhat trendy to cap bottles with screw tops, instead of corks. While the screw top tends to be associated with cheaper varieties, this isn’t necessarily the case any more. For example, nearly all of the wine that comes out of New Zealand is now capped with screw tops. (Read more…) (And, read more still…)
- In relation to the first point, environmentalists are worried that the switch from corks to screw tops and plastic stoppers (aka: plastic corks) will put the cork oak forests at risk. It’s an interesting change from the ordinary story about man destroying the environment. In the case of cork oak forests, human intervention has actually been a boon to the wildlife that lives in these forests. With the lessening popularity of corked wine (that is, wine sealed with a cork, not wine that has been contaminated), as much as 75% of the cork forests may be gone within ten years.
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