Wine Toys

It was my apartment’s turn to host Sunday dinner again last week.  We fell back on the usual pasta option and decided to keep it simple with a meat sauce.  Determined to make the simple dish as good as I could possibly make it, I decided to start it a good 3 hours before dinner and let the sauce simmer with the hope that it would gain flavor as it was cooked.  I think the sauce turned out pretty good but I’m not sure that the couple of hours spent in the kitchen were worth it.  Especially since I wasn’t drinking wine while I was cooking.  I tend follow the old saying- “I love cooking with wine; sometimes I even put it in the food.”  I was amazed that I went so long cooking Italian food of all things without thinking to open some wine. 

When I finally decided to go open a bottle, I took a quick inventory of my Italian wines.  I had just two.  An Amarone and a Brunello.  I decided to open the Brunello but knew that I wasn’t going to wait anytime at all for it to aerate and open up before drinking it.  So, I pulled out my handy Vinturi aerator, hoping that it would do the job for me.  I’ve got mixed feelings on this little contraption but I was in a bind so I had to trust that the little glorified funnel would open up my wine in an instant rather than waiting hours to let it happen naturally.  I was impressed with how it worked on the first glass, I had tried a sip of the wine immediately after opening the bottle and couldn’t taste much but this time I got a wide variety of flavors and even seemed to get a different finish.

While the difference in taste between the Vinturi and naturally aerated wine diminished with each subsequent glass, the little aerator did make for a good wine toy and it intrigued most of my friends that were over for dinner.  I know that I spent most of my last post pointing out the negatives in what I consider to be a useless wine toy, and I am well aware of the fact that the Vinturi aerator could very well fall into the useless wine toy category as well, but I kinda enjoy it despite the fact some people see them as useless.  Wine toys are fun on occasion.  They get people excited to drink or try new wine which is always a good thing, so maybe I was a little harsh on the wine straws last week.  They still aren’t for me, but if they encourage others to try more wine or if they make drinking wine more enjoyable for some, then more power to them.  I’ll just keep playing with my aerator.