Sometimes Magic Works

I think Julie Andrews said it best in the song My Favorite Things from the “Sound of Music”:

Foil knives and port tongs and tall champagne glasses. Cork screws and coasters that appeal to the masses. Funnels with mesh screens that remove all kinds of things. These are the gadgets a wine lover brings.

I’m not sure why they edited out that verse from the final cut, but Maria von Trapp sure was right. There are a lot things a wine lover can put in his or her tackle box. Whether you want to remove a stubborn cork or call up tasting notes for just about every wine ever made, there’s a gadget for that. The inner MacGyver in me loves these myriad devices, but honestly you don’t need much outside of a tulip-shaped glass and a sturdy corkscrew to enjoy wine.

One of the largest sub-categories of wine doohickeys are devices that instantly age or somehow influence the tastes and/or flavors of wine. I’ve tried just about all of these and I’ve got one word for them: BOGUS! Over the years, I’ve conducted blind tastings with various magnetic and electronic gizmos that you either place the bottle in or attach to the bottle neck. They either flat out don’t work or have such a minimal influence that they’re virtually useless.

So with this slightly cynical mindset, I was more than a bit skeptical back in January when my friend John Morris asked: “Hey, Gil, you heard about the Vinturi wine aerator?” Yes, I had. It’s a $40 thingamajig that “magically” enhances a wine’s flavors and aromas. Essentially, it’s a plastic shot glass with a small hole in the side a large hole on the bottom that you pour wine through.

Morris, a well-respected wine educator in the Florida panhandle, understood my apprehension, but insisted I give it a chance. To my utter disbelief after tasting six wines—one plain and one poured through the Vinturi—the thing works.

Intrigued (and sensing an easy topic for a column), I called three of the best palates in the South. They were unavailable, so I invited over well-known food writer John Kessler, Eric Crane, director of education for a large national wine distributor, and Joe Truex, co-owner and chef of Repast, one of America’s Best Wine-Driven Restaurants in 2008, according to Wine Enthusiast magazine. The three of them sat at my kitchen table one March morning to evaluate the Vinturi.

Not to ruin the suspense, but they all agreed the Vinturi performs as advertised. I served them several very different wines: 1999 H. Brac de la Perrier Chassagne-Montrachet, 2001 Gaja Conteisa, 2003 Warre’s Port and an unmentionable wine (more on that later). The wines were tasted blind and almost without fail, they picked out the Vinturi-enhanced wine. Essentially, the Vinturi works like a decanter, which allows a wine’s hidden aromatic and flavor qualities to develop, only a lot faster.

What I didn’t expect out of this tasting was a heart-felt discussion about what is lost and what is gained when one uses gadgets like the Vinturi.

“I think if you wanted to get from point A to point B, the Vinturi will achieve that purpose,” Truex said. “It will take a wine from one stage to another. But there are other things that happen to wine.” Sitting squarely in the anti-gadget camp, Truex prefers to see how a wine develops over time.

Not exactly pro-gadget, Crane saw the practical side to Vinturi-like devices. “If I’m going on a fishing trip with my buddies, sometimes I want to enjoy the drive there and see the sights,” Crane said. “But there are other times when I just want to get there. Would I prefer to always have the time to sip, swirl and see how a wine develops? Sure, but that’s not always possible.”

Truex believes we all could linger longer over our wines. When we skip the journey between the cork popping and the last drop, we forget that wine is a living thing that evolves and expresses itself in different ways over time. It is in this conversation that Truex finds the magic in wine.

“People over-decant wine in general,” Truex said. “A lot of wines don’t need oxygen. If it is a fresh, young wine, why change it?”

Kessler and I mostly observed Crane and Truex exchange opposing views on wine gizmos, decanting, screwcaps and corks. However, when Truex pointed out that a wine’s journey is just starting as it is poured into a glass, Kessler remembered a recent meeting he had with Gaia Gaja, the eldest daughter of the renowned Italian winemaker Angelo Gaja.

“I do think there is something about how a wine changes in the glass and that would be missed [with the Vinturi],” Kessler said. “When we were tasting with Gaia Gaja the other day, she poured one that was very closed off. It was very interesting how it changed and evolved. That was exciting.”

Nevertheless, Kessler, who was the most skeptical about the Vinturi coming in, said he’d still buy one. He does note one key caveat regarding the Vinturi: It won’t put lipstick on a pig.

The unmentionable wine mentioned above was one I found previously to be awful. I thought the Vinturi might work its magic on this $6 red wine from California. It did. Unfortunately, it was black magic. The tasters agreed the non-Vinturi wine was bad. Unfortunately, the panel felt the aerator only highlighted the worst parts of this dreadful wine. Crane summed up the thoughts of the tasters on the Vinturied wine, labeled Wine A: “[Wine A] smells like a bar two days after New Years. There is something horribly wrong with A.”

An interesting side note about my Vinturi tasting was the panel’s evaluation of another gadget called the Wine Wand. The day I was organizing this tasting, I coincidentally received a press release from the Philip Stein Company. Philip Stein makes the Wine Wand, a glass tube with five tiny glass balls rolling around inside. You stick the tube in your wine and, according to the release, “using permanently embedded natural frequencies, one of them being oxygen, this accessory accelerates the aeration of the wine to its full flavor potential, in just minutes.” They generously over-nighted a wand for us to try.

Unlike the Vinturi, nobody on the panel could confidently distinguish between the wanded and unwanded wines. Crane not only declared the ineffectiveness of this frequency enhancing device, he took exception to the Wine Wand’s price ($325 for the travel wand/$525 for the bottle wand). “They’re preying on buyers of luxury goods,” Crane said. “They’re making wine more exclusive than it needs to be, and wine is already stigmatized enough.”

Truex, with an obvious smirk, started out with a more objective, understanding opinion of the Wine Wand: “Y’know, one day, we might find out that we’re all buffoons and discover that [the Wine Wand] is the thing that really works and we all need one….but I don’t think so.”

Foil knives and port tongs and tall champagne glasses.
Cork screws and coasters that appeal to the masses…

Originally published April 2, 2009, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Just because some devices don’t look like they can work, sometimes they do. You just pour the wine through the cup-like Vinturi into your glass.

From left to right, Joe, John and Eric put the Vinturi through its paces in my kitchen.