32°
The dregs
Don’t smell the cork!
Smelling the wine cork provides little information as to what you're actually drinking.
9:00 pm Oct 12 - by Caleb Ganzer – buzz Columnist
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Various wine glasses and information packets scatter the tables at Radio Maria in Champaign, Sunday, January 20, 2007, for the Wine 101 class that takes place there every other week. (Tom Root)
I’ve seen it a million times. A well-meaning, self-appointed wine enthusiast seizes the wine list from the rest of his/her fellow diners at a nice restaurant. He/she chooses appropriately to complement most diners’ dishes. One might think that person knows his/her stuff.
Then the server begins the oft-too awkward process of presenting the bottle of wine.
Stop right there. First of all, why is this process even done? Essentially, it is to ensure that the wine is drinking well, i.e. that the bottle is not ‘corked’ (that which happens when a wine bottle has been improperly handled somewhere along in the production or distribution process - a corked wine will smell like wet, moldy cardboard), that’s about it.
What the process is not for is to smell the cork. The cork may be admired, squeezed, and for feel it up like a melon at a farmer's market, but for God’s sake don’t smell it! The only thing a cork will smell like, even one that is in a pretty bad shape, is wet cork. A cork’s smell will tell you precisely jack about the condition of your wine.
The wine should do all the talking here. Swirl the wine around the glass so as to increase its surface area. This allows the host to better get a peak at the wine’s bouquet. It is far better to swirl it around on the table than clumsily slosh it back and forth in the glass. You don’t even need to taste it. A tongueless baboon, assuming the he knows what good wine smells like, can perform this task.
To recap: in order to look really cool in front of your professor, hot date, client or mom when you order that bottle of wine at dinner, just swirl it, smell it and nod. If you want, save the cork and sell it on eBay.
Caleb Ganzer is a wine steward at bacaro restaurant in downtown Champaign and a wine consultant at the Corkscrew Wine Emporium in Urbana. Although he enjoys a fine glass of wine, he certainly has no qualms with, and spent most of his summer, quaffing a chilled, non-vintage Corona with lime.
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