RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Gwynvyd
quote:
ORIGINAL: FatDomDaddy
What is being left out here is that Absinthe was a convient scapegoat for the Temprence Folks. The same folks that forced probition upon us and the sme ones who keep a 19 year old Iraqi war veteran from picking up a six pack.
I like Absinthe and the ritual is half the fun. We are soon to lose the whole cork ritual with wines as screw tops and boxes have proven they are better protectors so I am glad some of the rituals like decanting and the whole Absinthe ritrual are coming back to replace them.
Oh no.. not the screw top and box o' wine crap... *shudders* call me a snob.. but damn..... after I got past my teens ( literialy) of the Ohh.. Boone Farm is some cheap and easily accessable shit phase ( even then I would have a bottle of the good stuff in reserve) I can't do the box.
No matter how cute the commercials. Nope.
Gwyn
Well I’m sort of with you on that one, and then again I’m also not.
Let me explain: I do genuinely enjoy opening bottles of wine with corkscrews, as it ticks both the “ritual” and “gadget” boxes for me, and have purchased numerous corkscrews over the years, but, as an efficient and, above all, sterile closure material, cork is a bit hit and miss. The last figures I saw said that (and it was based on batch sampling, so may be less than 100% accurate) something ITRO 10-15% of all wine that used a cork was contaminated by said cork (oddly though, less than 5% of wine drinkers can detect a corked bottle). The stuff is, after all, a form of bark, and as a result has lots of microbes living in and on it. They steam clean it, but the problem is that if you steam it too much then it either a) starts to break up or b) becomes too moist internally and fails as a result, so they tend to try for optimum cleaning, but mistakes get made and of course, being natural, it’s not a uniform material.
Now I don’t know about you, but the thought of 15% of the world’s wine going straight down the plughole is one which causes me to weep. All that lovely wine, ruined by microbes … cut off in its prime, as it were, and unable to unleash its glorious, fruity and “sunshine in a glass” capacity is tragic.
So, in one respect the screw-top closure is a godsend. However, there is (IMHO) something fundamentally “wrong” with using a screw-top – it’s both a) pikey/chavvy/proletarian (delete as appropriate) and b) smacks of a bunch of rednecks/morons/alkies sitting around and drinking MD 20/20/Buckfast or similar. Not, I would hope you would agree, an ideal solution, and one I which I detest – I need closure on my closures, IYSWIM.
So the artificial cork, which has come into popular usage of late, is an ideal compromise; I thus get to faff about with a fiddly closure, utilising a variety of techie devices which are neither any better than a plain old-style corkscrew, nor any more durable, and which are guaranteed to remove a fair chunk of flesh, or impale one, should they fail, which they inevitably do, and always when you have the biggest audience. So I’m kept happy and Elastoplast stay in profit. Hooray.
I have read though that plastic closures are only any good for cheaper-to-medium priced wines; once you get into the higher-priced stuff there’s apparently a very subtle interaction between the cork (and its nasties) and the wine, as it ages; no problem for 2-buck Chuck and his type (not that there’s anything wrong with cheaper wine – I used to love sitting on the porch, drinking chilled, cheap white wine), but not the right solution for the top-of-the-range Châteaux Margaux or the like, so the bottom line is you’ll see more screw tops and plastic corks for cheaper stuff, and the higher priced stuff will probably stick with their genuine cork corks.
Turning to wine boxes, you’re right that they used to be a dumping ground for the very worst wines, but over the last 5 years there have been some huge improvements. Is it as good as a bottle? Not IMHO, but they are jolly practical, as they slow down the oxidation of wine once opened; I like to keep a box of red or white in the fridge for cooking duty, as well as a little light “refreshment” of the chef (me) before opening the good stuff when the guests arrive. Very handy, although I’ve noticed that a bottle is about my right amount for a normal (working the next day) evening, whereas with an opened wine box I tend to think “this is jolly drinkable”, and then I’m having difficulty seeing straight, and only the next morning do I realise I’ve slurped my way through 1.5 litres of the stuff. Dangerous.
The one other thing I thought of was recycling; in this modern era, where the civilised world seems to be run by a bunch of tree-hugging hippies who seem to buy into every doomsday scenario going, we are all going to have to live with increased recycling – personally, I don’t mind recycling too much as I find landfill to be a somewhat cack-handed solution, and it strikes me that bottles are made of glass, so presumably easy to recycle, whereas wine boxes are made of special card, lined with some very trick inert plastics (which is why it took them ages to develop them), which would be less so, maybe? Not sure about that one, but maybe someone here knows more.
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RE: Absinthe? - 
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i'm really not white trash ok? 
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