Jenny Downing, Flickr
No doubt, the wine market in Hong Kong is maturing, as the Chinese become more knowledgeable about wine, tastes have graduated from Bordeaux to wines from around the world. But most people still have a few common misunderstandings about wine, such as picking wines based on how old they are or equating French wine with quality.
Of course, you are free to drink wine in whatever way you want — but if you’d like to enjoy the drink more fully, you might want to bust these misconceptions most people have about the wonderful beverage.
The pitfalls of wine swirling
When handed a glass of wine, most people seem to instinctively swirl it, a gesture as automatic as chewing before swallowing. Swirling your wine glass seems like a fashionable thing to do, especially when you look deep and thoughtful or while you’re engrossed in a conversation. It’s not uncommon to see people swirling their wine so vigourously that it spills over the rim and onto a shirt or dress, causing an awkward uh-oh moment.
The point of swirling, or moving the glass in a circular motion, mixes wine with air bubbles to release its flavours, but that’s not always a good thing. About 90 percent of all wines made are meant to be opened and drunk within two years rather than kept to age in a cellar. Over-swirling a bottle of wine can overexpose it to oxygen and age the wine faster, fading its fruit and flavours. Unless you’ve got a wine made to be kept for five or 10 years, swirling a wine vigorously and constantly — which is what many people like to do — will quickly make your wine taste dull and flat.
Vigorous swirling is especially a no-no for delicate wines like Pinot Noir, which will kill it and leave naught but a ghost of its exquisite fruit. Swirling is great, however, if you’ve got a really old wine and you don’t have a decanter on hand and want to quickly aerate the wine to wake it up, or you are opening a wine that’s not ready to be drunk for another few years. Rather than going swirl-crazy, give your wine a few gentle swirls — a wonderful way to release a wine’s aroma before sipping it.
French wine = quality?
We Hongkongers love our French wine. In fact, French wine accounts for almost half of all the wine we import. That’s a lot of wine — considering that there are dozens of other wine-producing countries like Italy, Spain, Australia, or more exotic ones like Switzerland, Lebanon, and Bulgaria. Its popularity surely can’t be attributed to its accessibility, for French wine has frustratingly confusing classifications: regions, sub-regions, and sub-sub-sub regions — which means it can be a challenge to pick something that’s actually what you want. For example, did you know that the classification “Bordeaux Superieur” is definitely not superior to other Bordeaux appellations? Confusing.
And then there’s the magic word Bordeaux — which, because of Lafite, has become synonymous with expensive and high-quality. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, we would go so far as to say that with the exception of first-growth wines like Lafite, the majority of wines imported from Bordeaux (especially white wine) is so poorly made that it’s undrinkable.
As we mentioned in a previous article on pairing wines with Hong Kong comfort food, drinking Bordeaux with Chinese food (as the Chinese is apt to do) turns even great Bordeaux into wash water, because Bordeaux is an elegant wine that can be easily overpowered by our pork-and-garlic heavy dishes. We are not saying not to drink Bordeaux with Chinese food (there are exceptional examples) — but it’s a pairing that needs to be done with some care.
Instead of sticking only to French or Bordeaux wine, be a little adventurous and spring for a classic Chianti from Italy, an easy-drinking Argentinean red, or some bubbly cava from Spain — lots of great selections out there that will surely beat the French-for-all mentality.
Doing the restaurant taste test
You are at a high-end restaurant. You pick a wine from the gold-embossed wine list and the bottle arrives, the label shown. Uncorking the bottle expertly, the waiter pours a tasting portion into your glass with a little ceremonial flourish and invites you to take a taste. Faces stare at you expectantly.
Don’t worry, you are not expected to wax poetic about the wine. The taste test is meant to assess whether the wine is corked, a fault that can happen to wines and makes it smell like sweaty socks. If the wine does smell like sweaty socks, you can usually smell it the instant the wine hits the glass. We suggest giving the wine a sniff rather than risk sipping sweaty-socks wine. Another wine fault — oxidation — is a little harder to pick up, but the tell-tale sign is a flat and fruit-less taste from overexposure to oxygen.
Believe that older = better
The adage goes that fine wine gets better with age — and that is true indeed for fine wines, or 10 percent of all wines made. But for the other 90 percent of wines on the market, 1995 will not be better than 2001 — unless you have a habit of hauling home Lascombes and Haut-Brion by the case. Almost all wines you encounter will taste good drunk within two years of the vintage on the bottle.
Even when you have a Chianti or Bordeaux made for cellaring, older does not unequivocally equate to better. The quality of a vintage is relative to where the wine is from. 1982 was a spectacular year in Bordeaux, where the forces of nature — soil, grapes, weather — harmonised to create the vintage of the century. But the same year — 1982 — in Burgundy, France, just a few regions away, was a terrible year with too much rain, making their wine watery. In addition, nowadays wine making is so advanced that even in a “bad” year great houses have managed to maintain the quality of the wine from year to year, so vintages don’t really matter that much unless you are in the wine-investment league.
Opening Champagne with a “pop”
We love this quote: “Open champagne with a sigh, not a pop.” Although popping corks and spraying champagne everywhere is a favourite at parties and on New Year’s Eve, cork-popping is actually pretty dangerous. It can hit you and take out an eye, which happens more often than you think. Nearly half of all champagne cork injuries leave the victim blind — a terrible thing to happen on New Year’s Eve.
To open champagne properly, remove the foil and untwist the metal cage guarding the cork — five clockwise turns should do the trick. Leave the cage on loosely and hold the champagne at a 45-degree angle away from you. Grip the base of the bottle and turn it counter-clockwise to loosen the bottle from the cork, not the cork from the bottle. If you do it correctly, you will be rewarded with a small sigh — also known (quite aptly) as the lover’s sigh. Enjoy!
