Essential Wine Tools for Proper Enjoyment
In your love affair with wine, no doubt you will come across a lot of tools and gadgets for your wine collection. Some are useful, and others are not. Having the proper tools will allow you to fully enjoy your wine hobby without annoyance and unnecessary hard work!
The first and most essential tool in your wine kit is a sturdy high-quality corkscrew. Our favorite is a corkscrew that has two levers on the side that pulls the cork out gradually. This also reduces the chance that the cork will break inside the bottle. This is almost as important as a high-quality set of glasses that can accommodate white wine and red wine. Remember, red wines need broader glasses for more aeration when you swirl it. I recommend Riedel glasses. They are moderately priced, and are the perfect balance of quality and cost.
Another essential tool is a basic decanter to remove sediment from red wines and also aerate your wine prior to serving. Use the decanter a half hour or so before consuming your wine and you’ll notice the finest reds becoming smoother and richer.
Yet another useful tool is the serving sleeve. This is an insulating sleeve that you can put in your freezer or refrigerator, and wrap around wine bottles that you are serving. This is especially useful for when you have dinner parties and want to show off your latest white. In fact, serving sleeves are the fastest way to cool down a wine safely. You never want to cool a wine too quickly though, it can degrade the quality of the wine’s taste.
Lastly, no wine hobbyist can do without a cork pump. This tool screws into the top of the wine bottle, and has a lever where you can pump out the air. This is useful for when you want to save an open bottle of wine for as long as possible with the best flavor. While you cannot save any wine for longer than a few days, this tool will allow the flavor to stay as fresh as possible. More expensive pumps tend to work better, and they even make some that have a spout so you can pour from them.
A good gadget to have on hand is a foil cutter. Simply place one of these on the cap and go around it. The tool cuts the top foil away from the cork for easy access to the opening. Another good tool to have, especially if you have a lot of wine, is a simple digital thermometer. Remember you should always have a reliable thermometer for your cellar. Adding a digital thermometer for your wine will let you reliably know when to serve your wine at its optimal temperature for best taste. As you become more experienced, you will probably be able to tell the proper temperature of wine just by touch. But in the beginning, a digital thermometer is a good way to gauge proper temperatures for serving.
Written by JC of winehappy.com - a wine social network site
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