THE ART OF STANDARD WINNING - NOT ALL KNOW

Drinking wine that wants to enjoy until the end, also needs to follow some rituals.

It may sound complicated at first, but if we consider drinking as an art of living, like the Japanese raising their tea drinking to the Tea Ceremony with all its formalities, we will see. It’s just a matter of nature, which adds to the fun.

When drinking in the family or with close friends at a picnic, we can do whatever we want. But in most other more formal situations, one should master the etiquette of serving or ordering wine to behave properly.

If we order wine in a restaurant, all the necessary formalities will be taken care of by the Sommelier, but we also need to know how to order, or respond to his actions. To organize a party with wine to treat friends and guests at home, we will have to do all the necessary rituals ourselves.

There are really only a few basic things to keep in mind. But if done wrong, drinking, which is supposed to be an elegant act, turns out to be crude, rustic.

“A good bottle of wine, like a good play, still shines when you think back on it”

CORKSCREW

Over the past few hundred years, since people began to use the bark of the oak tree (a special oak variety with a very thick bark called Cork Oak) to make wine bottle stoppers, many types of corkscrews with the shape of and various uses have been invented.

The simple style is too simple, the inconvenience is that people have to put strength, on the tendons, to pull the cork up. The style is so sophisticated, it looks really beautiful and majestic, but most of them are bulky, big, can’t be pocketed so that they can be taken out when needed.

The easiest to use is the screwpull model, which costs about 5 to 10 dollars and is effortless. This style fits snugly into the neck of the bottle, so the screw will pull straight up, not leaning to one side, the cork will not break right in the middle, or break, causing crumbs to fall into the wine. We keep turning it clockwise and the button will gradually be pushed out. Without having to pull anything, the twisted nail will go straight down the cork, then automatically change direction, pulling the cork up.

BUTTON, METAL BUTTON, GLASS BUTTON OR PLASTIC BUTTON?

The use of oak wood to make wine corks was a very unprofitable invention a few hundred years ago. It is both more flexible and more elastic than wooden buttons or ceramic stoppers that were still popular before. It has the ability to better preserve wine by preventing air from entering the bottle from spoiling the wine. Thanks to that, wine can be stored for a long time, allowing mankind to enjoy the unique flavors of old wine that only time can bring.

But on the other hand, oak bark also has serious defects. Because it is an herbal substance, it will at best take a few decades to begin to disintegrate and then disintegrate. Therefore, when opening old wine bottles, people often have the problem of broken cork, unable to remove the whole bottle from the neck. Not to mention the small pieces falling into the wine cause a lot of trouble.

The second disadvantage is that oak bark is susceptible to contamination by a chemical called Tri-Chloro-Anisole, abbreviated TCA, which is used to disinfect before cutting it into cork. By the time the cork comes into contact with alcohol, that chemical causes pollution, causing the wine to have a musty smell like a piece of damp cardboard or a dark cellar that has been sealed for a long time.

It is estimated that between 3% and 5% of wine bottles are contaminated more or less by cork-tainted. Drinking a bottle of wine with such a bad smell is very disheartening. If we’re in a restaurant, we have the right to return or exchange for another bottle, but if we’re at home, we can’t do it.

To avoid that problem, some manufacturers have switched to using plastic cork instead of cork. Others, including expensive winemakers like Taylors Wines, or Pluumjack (more than US$100) have decided to replace the cork with an aluminum one (twist cap or screw cap), just a twist and it’s done. , like a Coca Cola cork.

Many consumers do not accept it because wine is a product that is both snag and romantic. Opening a bottle of wine is like opening a bottle of Coke, it is old and noble. The controversy is still unresolved to this day.

Meanwhile, a flurry of new initiatives on how to cork to both block oxygen and avoid contamination by TCA, without making the bottle look cheap, continues to roll out.

Some people use a plexoglass stopper called Vino-Lock, which fits snugly around the neck of the bottle with a tiny plastic ring. When opening the wine, just turn it slightly and the ring will break so we can pull the cork up.

Some houses still use the classic “cork” button as most customers prefer, but the button is covered with many layers of transparent, thin polymer film so that the cork does not come in contact with the alcohol, so it does not cause contamination. called Pocork. It’s good that consumers see it as no different from a regular cork, so it doesn’t feel like a cheap or romantic bottle of wine.

But most notably is the Zork button, which was invented in Australia and used by many major brands. The Zork stopper made of polymer plastic consists of 3 parts: one is the outer shell that sticks to the neck of the wine bottle, when it is opened, it breaks, to ensure that no one has opened it, the other is a thin sheet of metal paper. (foil) inner lining to prevent oxygen and three is a polyethylene cork, which is pushed deep into the neck of the bottle.

You may be wondering: Just a few corkscrews, what’s the point of arguing so much? Please sir, wine corks are a big industry in the world, each year earning more than 4 billion US dollars, containing not as much junk as we think.

The thick-bark oak tree used for cork usually lives for more than 150 years.

A tall oak tree in Portugal is being peeled. The worker must be careful to only remove the thick outer shell without damaging the inside. The new shell will gradually grow back and possibly peel again, every 9 years.

The bark that has been stripped from the tree is then dried in the open air for a while to hunt again, then boiled in a barrel of boiling water to kill all insects and make the bark softer and more elastic. Finally, it is trimmed into round and long columns and from there cut into pieces, to the exact size needed for each type of bottle neck.

The manager of Plumjack, one of the best wineries in the Napa Valley, said that after the company switched to twistcaps for their expensive bottles, consumers continued to buy. , and the wine produced is still not enough to sell.

TRUE WINE SYSTEM IN VIETNAM

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