Wine Gadgets The World Needs
Lore Sjöberg, who often writes humorous pieces for Wired, has put his satirical pen to paper and pondered the wine gadgets missing from the world. An automatic wine twirler? A tooth-mounted flavor sensor? A temporal acceleration device to age your wine? (He’s obviously unaware of the devices that purport to do this.)
How about his idea for a first-person Champagne shooter? I could combine my love of video games with my love of wine, though I’m not a big FPS fan.
I can’t help but point out that his use of the word “varietal” — to my mind, a misuse — illustrates my belief that we shouldn’t use the word except in its very specific meaning of a bottle marketed as being made from a single grape variety. Why use jargon incorrectly when there’s a perfectly good non-jargon term? That’s part of why culture views wine geeks as objects of derision.
- Uc Berkeley Wine Studies Ii, Fall
I’m once again teaching Fundamentals of Wine Studies II: Sensory Evaluation of Wines and their Components for UC Berkeley Extension, and I’d love to see some of you in the class. If you’ve ever wanted to see if I can actually babble...
- Food/wine Pairing Tasting Notes
Here is a question I often ponder. If you are going to suggest a wine to go with a particular dish (or vice versa), why would you just write a regular tasting note and not reference the dish? That thought crept into my mind again as I noticed this post...
- American Wine Blog Awards
Last year, Tom Wark at Fermentation hosted the American Wine Blog Awards, and they proved popular enough to do a second time. If you read wine blogs — I consider OWF a food and wine blog, which means it doesn’t quite fit in either category...
- What Is Bimbo Break?
I was trying to solve a puzzle in the latest issue of The Enigma, the monthly publication of The National Puzzlers’ League, and I decided the answer might be one of the Coca-Cola brands. I haven’t memorized them, of course, so I looked them...
- 2004 Parducci "true Grit" Petite Sirah, Mendocino, California
If you don’t read many other food and wine blogs, you may have forgotten about Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly, Internet-wide tasting event. I typically forget about the event until I see everyone else’s posts, at which point it’s...