Savvy Tips for Satisfying your Wine Curiosity
The “Fridge of Sighs.” In some wine shops, that’s the name given to the enclosed area containing all the finest bottles. Most shoppers sigh and turn away from the prices marked there. But you should make the shop owner an offer anyway. If a white collectible is over 5 years old or a red is over 10-15, she may not want to risk having it in the shop past its prime. She would rather liberate cash flow for, say, that trendy locavore gin from Brooklyn, and you could get a discount of perhaps 5 to 15%. It’s a wine-win situation!
Flash sales sites are the latest catnip for the wine-curious. A flash site lets wineries sell excess inventory fast. Few people notice, so the winery’s reputation doesn’t take a hit. www.Vitis.com, Westchester’s very own flash site, sees some wines fly out in a few minutes. The wines are often high-end, but priced sub-basement. Shipping is usually thrown in.
Imagine being able to try a wine before you buy it. Such is the promise of a wine-preservation system called Coravin (https://www.coravin.com/) that came onto the retail market last July. The system inserts a needle through the foil and cork of a bottle, pours wine out through the needle, then leaves behind inert argon gas that keeps the wine for years after. In other words, you can sample many wines without spending oodles of money. Or have part of a bottle at home, then drink the rest a month later. Coravin is already in use at Vinifera in Mamaroneck, G. Griffin in Rye, Tarry Wine in Port Chester, the Harrison Wine Vault, and Zachy’s. Even the great wine writer Jancis Robinson has raved about Coravin: “[in a blind tasting] two bottles [of the same wine] seemed identical to me, even though one had been accessed [three years before].”
(This article originally appeared in Westchester Magazine.)
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