A Great Restaurant...

The private dining room and wine cellar at Brix Restaurant, just North of Yountville in the Napa Valley, is available for special functions. Seating for 10 would be spacious, and there is a rumour about 50 if you like to stand and be friendly.

Brix has a great menu and wine list, incredibly attentive staff, is as close as you can get to eating in the middle of a vineyard with air conditioning, and also has a delightful patio.

Glass Closures.. Corks, Zorks, And Glorks.

Wines with corks (CORKS?) should be stored so that the wine touches the cork and helps to keep it moist....
EXCEPT if you are storing Champagne or sparkling wines for a long time and these must be stored upright. The alcohol will damage the elasticity of the cork that may eventually lead to total loss of gas pressure and at this point, you now have white wine and can store it on its side or just drink it now.
A large, long term study on the effects of storage position in England, and a smaller short term study in France, offered conclusive results, and I am continuing to test old Champagne as often as possible.
Fortified wines such as Sherry, Port, and Madeira should be stored upright because the high alcohol content will also damage the cork.
Wines (and now some sparkling wines) with plastic corks (ZORKS?) or crown caps (KAPPS?) may be stored in any position you want because I do not really care.
Since the relative humidity inside a bottle of wine is always going to be really high, it is possible that having the wine touch the cork in any situation would be unnecessary. This theory may be just another one of those old stories passed down as folklore and finally moot.
Just because a bottle of wine goes bad, it does not mean that the cork dried out from bad storage conditions. How many of these corks have actually been tested immediately, when all we want at the time is a good glass of wine?
Inquiring minds want to know… And now I just pulled an article from the Internet suggesting that the new crown cap closures offered by some manufacturers may expect to cause tainting of the wine at a rate of about 2%. Would it be possible to find out this sort of thing during product development do you think, or is immediate cost reduction more important than actual product quality?
A few producers are now offering a relatively new glass closure with a plastic seal (GLORKS?) that looks very promising. Not only will it probably work as a perfect closure, be relatively economical for the producers, a cool idea that “Special” wine drinkers will accept, and readily removed and re used, it will allow wine, Champagne, and liquor to be stored in any position. Opening and re-sealing the wine will be easy. (An assumption based on purpose because no one has sent me one yet...)
Is it possible that a solution has finally been developed that will allow relative humidity in wine cellars to be based on personal preference? Is it possible that the design of wine racks can finally evolve so that we can read the label? (I am talking about real wine racks here, not wall hangers).

© Paul Wyatt July 7, 2007.

Rubber Bands For Wine...

My cellars successfully tested big earthquakes with millions of bottles in the Bay Area and Los Angeles a few years ago and I recently submitted both my rack system and overhead structural steel supports for full engineering calculations. These are now required under new seismic codes in many cities and counties. It was a surprise to find that these are required for shelving and racking over six feet high, even if not fixed to the structure.

Serious collectors generally want the best quality on the market, and can usually afford anything they want. Tethering all their wine to the racks with little rubber bands would be unlikely, unnecessary, and unsightly. Bolting such a device to racks in a cellar that I had designed and built would be worse than hanging those tacky little plastic labels on the bottles and would probably terminate my lifetime warranty.

More wine is destroyed by failure to consume in a timely manner than all other causes combined. The most common wine storage device is the trunk of a car, which generally prepares the wine for immediate consumption within 24 hours.

© Paul Wyatt™ 2007