Give it a swirl

I’ve just begun my fourth year as this paper’s consummate wine authority, with something like 80 columns under my (rapidly shrinking) belt. I’ve regaled you guys with reports on products like ice wine, ginger wine, sake, retsina, vermouth (which, after all, is a wine), honey wine (which reportedly enhances virility) and even wine extracted from bugs in Minnesota. Finding a wine-neon hybrid would totally make my day—for the price of one bottle, you’d be twice as lit. I’ll check on that and get back to ya.

But it occurs to me that I devote precious little space to the art of drinking the stuff in the first place. That brings me to this week’s masterstroke, recently inspired by a girl at a wine bar who kept swirling her glass before she took each sip. She’d make these little whirlpools by moving the glass in a circle, then she’d wait a second to let the contents settle. I’ve done this, too, and with as much methodical verve as she—but I always thought it was to expose the beverage to as much air as possible so it can breathe. According to this gal, the object is to coat the sides of the glass and allow them to dry. The aroma (every bit as important as the taste, to hear her tell it) is what’s left, hence her big hefty sniff after each swirl.
You know what? She’s absolutely right. It works. Her enlightenment has spearheaded a whole new angle on red wine (which I was drinking at the time), and red is not always my all-time fave. Now that I know better, I’ll do reds more often for those of you who favor them. That report on neon-fortified whites will just have to wait.  

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