The Wine Broad's Board

Enologist Humor

I just returned from the annual ASEV trade show and conference, in Portland. The show has been slowing down over the last few years, and during the 2007 event the organizers announced that 2008 would be its last hurrah. (The annual meeting will take a different form next year, without the trade show part of the event.) As a result, 2008 trade show attendance was painfully S-L-O-W. At one point I spotted a couple of exhibitors watching a TV screen in their booth with rapt attention--only the TV was showing psychedelic squiggly lines, rather than any actual programming. Now that's boredom.

On a semi-humorous note, I overheard an interesting conversation on the plane ride from Oakland to Portland. The woman behind me, who was apparently giving a presentation at the conference, asked her companion to help her come up with a joke about Brettanomyces. They made a few lame attempts, then gave it up as hopeless.

Being the smart-ass that I am, I became determined to come up with a Brett joke, find this woman at the Portland convention center and pass the joke on to her just in time to make her presentation the hit of the show. (I have small dreams.) I never did find her, but here's the joke in case you're ever in need:

Two Brettanomyces walk into a bar. One of them orders a glass of red wine, jumps in, and starts swimming around. After a while he calls out to his buddy: “Hey Brett! Come on in—the wine is fine!” So Brett does a cannonball into the glass, splashing wine all over the bar, and the two friends start goofing around, dunking each other and having a great old time. The bartender looks over, sees the mess they’re making and yells, “Hey you two, quit horsing around! Were you born in a barn-yard?”

 

Yeah, I know: It's pretty terrible. But could you do any better? I hereby challenge you to post a Brett joke of your own. Come on: It's the yeast you can do!

Have Wine Will Travel

The next time you travel to a wine-y destination, don't let TSA regulations stop you from bringing back a couple souvenir bottles. Though you still can't bring wine onto airplanes in carry-on luggage, you can stash a couple bottles in your suitcase.

Yeah right, you say, but what if they break? No need to worry about getting Brunello all over your boxers if you bring along a couple Wine Skins. I first encountered these handy little bubble-wrap wine sleeves a few months ago, at the opening of Souverain's new tasting room in Healdsburg. Just slide your bottle into the wine-shaped plastic pouch, seal it and shash it in your suitcase along with your unmentionables. Even if the bottle breaks--which is unlikely, since the Wine Skin is made of extra-thick bubble wrap--the sleeve is leakproof. Pretty cool, eh? They cost just a few bucks each. Find out where to get 'em at http://www.ftscontent.com/.

If that's too much work, you can do what I did on my last trip to Italy: drag along a couple wine-shipping boxes in an empty suitcase. You won't need to ship the boxes home, just place the wine safely inside the Styrofoam, seal the boxes up and check them along with your luggage. 

Bon Voyage!  

Too Hot to Handle

Ever notice on a particularly hot day that your wine bottles are leaking up through the corks?

Heat is one of wine's many enemies--along with light, vibration and neo-Prohibitionists. When the going gets hot, your wine could quickly go from tasty to nasty. How? Heat forces wine to lurch forward in its aging process in a decidedly ungraceful way. Even if your heat-exposed wine manages to escape immediate damage (the wine can have a "stewed" taste), it will usually start going downhill on a rapid rate. When that happens it's time to open that bottle and drink up!

Protecting wine from heat can be a challenge if you--like me--live in an older home, without air conditioning or even a nice cool basement for wine storage. One of these days I'll suck it up and buy one of those nifty temperature-controlled wine chillers, but until then, I'll just have to live with a few leaky bottles per year. (Anybody out there want to share their clever wine-storage ideas to help beat the heat?)

For more on the science and heartbreak of heat exposure, check out my latest column for Wine Review Online.