Category:Wine humor

Corks: The most dangerous wine closure in the world

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Watch this video, and you’ll understand how dangerous corks are

The Wine Curmudgeon will make no other comment on the following, other than this: “This young man would not have nearly blown up his kitchen if all wines had screwcaps.”

The complete story is here, via BuzzFeed. Lawrence Guo of San Leandro, Calif., wanted to open a bottle of rose, but his corkscrew broke. Disaster then ensued. He tried opening the bottle with a lighter, similar to a video he had seen on YouTube (and which we have detailed here).

When that didn’t work, he used the flame on a gas stove. The results were, in Guo’s words, disastrous – “we could have died,” he said. The bottle shattered, glass flew everywhere, and Guo and his friend were lucky to avoid injury.

He offers a lengthy explanation about what went wrong, quoting thermal shock, molecular vapor expansion, and vapor pressure. But we know the real reason.

Corks.

“We tried everything we could to open it, but the cork wouldn’t budge,” Guo told Buzzfeed. “I would advise to wear some better protective gear covering vital body parts if this were to be replicated.”

None of which you need with a screwcap.

Aliens (no, not that one): A wine parable (sort of)

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

aliensWhat happens when aliens from another galaxy discover wine – and the scores that go with it?

“I don’t understand,” said Brzyx. “What’s the point?”

“We’re humans,” said Miller. “We rate things. We list them. We rank them. That’s what we do.”

Brzyx’s accent was thick, but Miller could understand it without too much trouble. And why not? If its species was advanced enough to travel hundreds of light years to get to Earth, they could certainly speak passable English.

“But why can’t you just enjoy it?” said Brzyx. “It’s different, this wine, from anything we have at home. It’s pleasant. It’s – what’s your word? – enjoyable. I like the – what are they? – fruit flavors. I like the feeling I get from the thing you said was alcohol.”

“None of that is enough for us,” said Miller. “We have to sort things in order, top to bottom, first to last.”

“But scores?” said Brzyx. “All they do is spoil the fun, take the joy out of this wine thing. What possible difference could it make to anyone if something is 91 points or 92? Who can even tell the difference?”

“They claim they can,” said Miller. “It’s a huge business – lots of multi-million dollar companies, hundreds of experts claiming to know more about wine than anyone else. Telling people what kind of wine they should like.”

Brzyx sighed. At least Miller thought it was a sigh. It was kind of hard to tell.

“So you have all these wine experts spending all this time and money – scarce resources on your world – to give something as wonderful as wine a score, instead of using those resources to solve your world’s real problems, like hunger and poverty?”

“That’s pretty much it,” said Miller.

“Now humans make sense,” said Brzyx. “All that time and energy for nothing. No wonder you’re still stuck in this solar system and we had to find you.” He took a sip. “But I do like the wine.”

Five things the WC’s wine refrigerator has in common with the French presidential wine cellar

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

presidential wine cellar
The WC’s wine fridge is always open to the public.

Who says you have to have a presidential wine cellar to show off your wine collection?

The wine cellar in France’s presidential palace welcomed the public for the first time in its 71-year history over the weekend. This is a big deal, given that France has long been held as the world’s greatest wine producing country. And how many wine aficionados would want to see how the cellar’s 14,000 bottles reflected that?

But who says you have to have a presidential wine cellar to show off your wine collection? “Voulez-vous un verre de Bogle sauvignon blanc, Monsieur le Président? Ou peut-être un verre de Texas tempranillo?”

Hence, five things my wine refrigerator has in common with the French presidential wine cellar.

1. One quarter of the cellar’s bottles are from Burgundy, while half are from Bordeaux. I used to have a bottle of Bordeaux in the wine fridge, and actually have two bottles of white Burgundy in it now.

2. Among the bottles in the cellar are Cheval Blanc, Latour and Puligny-Montrachet, as well as a 1906 Sauternes. I visited Cheval Blanc during my epic Bordeaux adventure, sampled a terrific Latour at a trade tasting many years ago, and the Big Guy and I drink Puligny with some regularity. Plus, I enjoyed a glass of Sauternes (not 1906, however) in May during a half-price restaurant promotion.

3. Some 1,200 bottles were auctioned from the cellar in 2013. I have given away not quite that many bottles (samples, mostly) to friends and dinner guests, as well as to plumbers, electricians, and the like in exchange for work around the house.

4. French President Emmanuel Macron is apparently a wine geek who fared well in a recent blind tasting. Plus, he drinks wine with lunch and dinner. I drink wine with dinner, but not as often at lunch as I would like. And, despite my incredible wine geekiness, I am a notoriously bad blind taster.

5. This weekend’s guests will be shown a gold-engraved 2000 vintage of Mouton Rothschild and a 2004 Chateau Margaux. I have never seen bottles from those producers, let alone tasted them. But I have heard of them.

“Initials? We don’t need no stinkin’ initials”

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Bogey finds out what it’s like to deal with sommeliers — and they don’t need no stinkin’ initials

What happens when Bogey meets a group of sommeliers in the Mexican wilderness? It’s not pretty — and especially since they don’t need no stinkin’ initials.

My apologies to John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (as well as to anyone else who loves film) for doing this to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” A tip o’ the WC’s fedora to Wayne Belding, MS, who gave me the idea, as well as to WineParody, whose Robert Parker epic is the standard by which these efforts are judged.

Make sure you turn captions on when you watch the video; you can make the captions bigger or change their color by clicking on the settings gear on the lower right. Also, MovieClips, which allowed me to use the scene, may insert advertising or other content that I’m not responsible for.

Silly wine advice: “I would pair this with a nice microwavable macaroni and cheese”

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Sometimes, all we can do is laugh and be glad for silly wine advice

Hence, this fine effort from HelloGiggles on Youtube, which pretty much sums up what the rest of the world thinks about wine drinkers. Call it silly wine advice from the masses.

My other favorite part? The spitting when the woman finds out how much the wine costs. Which, come to think of it, also happens in the wine world — or at least it happens when I read the tasting notes and see what the wine costs. Do you think I can get my own show on the Food Network?

More about wine and humor:
• Birthday card wine wisdom
• Nine silly wine facts
• Redd’s Wicked Apple: “Let’s make fun of wine”

Coming soon to the WC: Computer-generated wine reviews

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

computer-generated wine reviews
“Damn. … where is that neural network when I need it?”

A little Python, some neural network command line work, and the blog can start posting computer-generated wine reviews

Sooner rather than later, I’m going to post computer-generated wine reviews on the blog. Thanks to the Lifehacker website, all I need are some basic Python programing skills. Or, even better, find a Python-savvy volunteer from among the blog’s sophisticated and erudite audience who wants to help “write” them.

We’ve followed the advances in artificial intelligence that makes these reviews possible for several years. Barbara Ehrenreich, writing in the New York Times, said that “the business of book reviewing could itself be automated and possibly improved by computers.” And writing one kind of review isn’t all that different from writing another kind.

The point here? That wine has become so mechanized and so predictable that we can probably get acceptable Winestream Media-style reviews from an artificial intelligence. It’s probably even possible to teach the machine to give scores – a delicious irony that is reason enough to make this work.

Lifehacker’s Beth Skawrecki writes that machine-written reviews are more possible than ever thanks to advances in neural networks. A neural network is “a type of [artificial intelligence] modeled on the network-like nature of our own brains. You train a neural network by giving it input: recipes, for example. The network strengthens some of the connections between its neurons (imitation brain cells) more than others as it learns. The idea is that it’s figuring out the rules of how the input works: which letters tend to follow others, for example. Once the network is trained, you can ask it to generate its own output, or to give it a partial input and ask it to fill in the rest.”

For our purposes, we would tell the computer what chardonnay is supposed to taste like, where the grapes were grown, information about the vintage and the winemaker’s style, and the price. Then, we can “teach” it to interpret that information to write the review – that chardonnay from California is different in certain ways from chardonnay from France, for example.

Now, to brush up on my Python.

More about computer-generated wine reviews:
• Winecast 30: Arty, the first artificial intelligence wine writer
• Do we really need wine writers?

“So simple, so cheap:” Home-made apple wine

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Home-made apple wine: “A perfectly passable table wine.”

There are any number of reasons to love this video from BrewTube — the narrator’s English accent, the addition of oak chips to the fermenting apple juice, and his conclusion: “A perfectly passable table wine.” The bravest among you might want to try this and let me know about the passable part.

I post this for a couple of reasons. First, my El Centro class ended this week, and one of the highlights this year — as it is every year — is the anecdote about making wine from orange juice. I always start the first lecture with the orange juice story: If you want to make wine, take a bottle of orange juice, put it in the back of the refrigerator, and you’ll get wine in a couple of weeks.

The wine may not be very good, but it is wine since the sugar has been converted to alcohol. More importantly, it demonstrates that winemaking is more than just the technical stuff. Not a lot of terroir in fermented orange juice. There’s also the bit about the student who had been in prison, and had done this in his cell, but that’s a story for another day.

Second, because I once tried making wine at home, using grape juice and the method in this video. The less said, the better, other than to note I had to dump 64 ounces of moldy grape juice down the sink.