Weird and wonderful wine gadgets: 8 tools you'll really use
Earlier this month, I suggested some fresh wines to try as the weather warms into spring and then summer. Today I want to focus on the tools and gadgets that go along with enjoying good wine. To be sure, you don't need anything but a glass and a corkscrew (assuming the bottle is sealed with a cork, and assuming it's a bottle at all!) But there are tools out there that can make your vinous adventures easier, classier, more convenient, or just more fun.
Here, I present eight useful gadgets — from the offbeat to the indispensable — all personally tested in my own kitchen or behind a tasting room bar.
Tools for Sipping
Summer means eating and drinking out of doors. I've had just enough accidents involving breakable glasses and hard patios to feel a little gun-shy about bringing my glassware out there. Fortunately, there's a solution in the form of the GoVino flexible wine glass. A nicely-designed stemless shape made of a food-safe, odorless polymer, it's also hard to drop, because there's a neat little ergonomic notch in the side for your thumb. Even if you do manage to drop one, these things simply cannot be shattered. You'd have to step on one — hard — to break it. After three years and several intense camping trips, my set still shows off the wine's aromatics beautifully. I've run them through the washer a few times, which isn't recommended and dulls the clarity perceptibly. Hand wash yours, and they may just live forever. This set comes with a decanter too, which is a nice bonus and another neat way to keep all the breakable stuff safely indoors.
Headed somewhere without a table? Determined to bring the glassware? Take your wine with you to the beach, park, or just the backyard with the help of a set of steady sticks. Push them into the sand or the grass, and you've got a solid platform for a bottle and a pair of glasses (the normal kind, with stems.)
Tools for Temperature Control
Wine geeks talk a lot about serving wine at the "correct temperature." This can get a little out of hand — drink your wine at the temperature it tastes best to you — but we're not entirely being silly. There really is an optimal temperature range for serving different types of wine, and sometimes you need a tool besides your refrigerator to manage that. If you want an exact number, make the minor investment in a good wine thermometer. These simply slip around the outside of the bottle and display the temp inside. I like this one because it's flexible, so it fits different shapes and sizes of bottle.
If you don't care about the number, but your wine has got to be chilled, skip the messy ice bucket and try this nifty gadget I just discovered. A friend and I had a bottle of not-so-cold Catarrato (a Sicilian white — I hadn't heard of it either) that needed to cool off for immediate consumption. There are several versions of the gadget she pulled out to fix this problem, but I'm partial to the Corksicle. It's a stainless steel tube with some freezing gel inside. Add it to the bottle and just leave it in while you sip: the stopper part has a flip-top pour spout. Store it in the freezer when you're not using it. This one can be pricey, but Amazon has it on sale right now for about 30% off the regular price.
Tools for Serving
You know when you open a bottle of wine and it just tastes...closed? People say things like "I can't smell it," and "there's just not much flavor here." Granted, you might just have a bad bottle, but most of the time, you're having that reaction because the wine really is "closed." The solution is to aerate it. You can do that by just pouring it in a glass and swirling it for awhile, or pouring the whole bottle into a decanter and letting it sit. But some wines take longer than others to open up, and maybe you don't have an hour to wait.
My favorite aerator is the Nuance Wine Finer, which goes beyond just aeration to also remove sediment by means of a built-in strainer, and allows you to elegantly and driplessly pour right from the bottle.
The Nuance is pretty low-key; if you have guests, they won't know it's anything more than an especially sleek pour spout. For a little more showmanship, try the Vinturi. These have been made fun of and adored in equal measure since their release, but they're remained enormously popular. You hold one above your glass and slowly pour the wine through. In about 30 seconds, you have a glass of wine that tastes like it's been decanted for at least an hour. They make an amusing sound while working, but work they do. And they have a lot of flare.
But let's go back to 'low-key' for a second. If you're serving wine in the bottle, there's this minor step before uncorking that plagues a lot of people: cutting the foil without making a mess.
Some of us pull haphazardly at the jagged metal, resulting in uneven tears and cut fingers. Some cut it by hand with the little knife that folds out of the corkscrew. And many of us cut the foil off altogether if we can't keep it neat. My advice: spend $5 for a simple gadget that takes only a turn of the bottle to cut the stuff like the pros do, in a neat circle just below the lip. A foil cutter is probably the cheapest way to look like you do this professionally.
And THE Tool for Cleaning Up
You know it's going to happen. Good intentions rarely keep anyone from spilling a drop on their shirt, or sloshing a bit onto the couch. I once tripped over my cat (pretty sure she did it on purpose) and sent an entire glass of Pinot Noir flying across a wide swath of rug. Lucky for my klutzy self (and fortunately for the cat), there is Wine Away. Non-toxic and nicely citrus-scented, it works as well on other tough stains as it does on wine, including, in my experience, pet stains, black tea, coffee, and blood. One bottle lasts a long time, but take advantage of the deal here and get three for a nice price. There's also an adorable "emergency kit" version, suitable for stashing in your bag on wine country getaways.
What do you think, wine lovers? Which wine gadgets are worth your time? And what will you be pouring this summer through that Vinturi aerator?
