Archive | Wine

If you’re looking for the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to build a wine cellar in your own home, the spiral cellar is for you. A watertight, pre-cast cylindrical system is sunk into the ground, and can be located anywhere, from your kitchen to your conservatory, workshop to your study. Designed to keep up to 1,600 bottles in ideal storage conditions, it relies on the surrounding earth for its insulation, like a traditional cellar, plus an ingenious airflow system, requiring no power to maintain the constant optimal temperature (10°C, plus or minus five degrees with no fluctuations) and humidity (70% to prevent the cork from drying out). Once you pay for the cellar, there are no additional costs, except for the wine itself, of course. A cellar is the only way of ensuring that the wine you’re drinking is in ideal condition, so if you always like to have a few dozen bottles around the place and tend to keep bottles for months or years before drinking them, you need a cellar to keep your wine in pristine condition. It even comes with a secret trap door so you can pretend you’re escaping from evil villains every time you go to get a bottle. Sounds like the perfect addition to any home, I just wonder if they can put one in my bedroom.

Below is a flash movie about the features of the cellar. Click on the green buttons for explanations of each feature.

[Spiral Cellars]

[Via: Neatorama]

Pomegranates are one of the hottest trends in the food industry. Full of antioxidants and vitamins, the pomegranate is gaining popularity for its health benefits as well as its taste. Now, an Israeli winery has created the first pomegranate wine. Pomegranates usually don’t have enough natural sugars to ferment into alcohol on their own, but the family that created the wine worked for years to create a fruit that was sweeter than any other pomegranate variety, and thus suitable for wine making. So far they have created a dry wine, a dessert wine, a port wine, and a rose style wine, each with its own distinct taste and characteristics. Plans include export to the US, so be on the lookout for pomegranate wine at your local wine shop, and try a little something different the next time you’re in the mood for some vino.

[Rimon Winery]

[Via: Luxist]

Did you know that you are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider? Sad but true. If you want to avoid an untimely trip to the emergency room following your next celebration cider opening, and find it hard if not impossible to control the cork trajectory on your own, then the Cork Catcher should be your next bubbly accessory purchase. “Simply remove the foil and cage, place the Cork Catcher on the bottle, hold firm and twist the bottle…pour and serve!” You get to enjoy the pop of the cork without feeling the pop of an eye. Sounds like a lifesaver to me.

[Screwpull]

[Via: OhGizmo!]

Oxygen and heat are the worst enemies of any great wine collection. If you’re going to open a bottle, you better plan on finishing it quickly, as the air that ads to the tongue pleasing aroma will quickly destroy that same great taste and nose. The Oxygen Displacing And Cooling Wine Vault from Hammacher Schlemmer “uses inert argon gas to completely displace oxygen through a specially designed reusable cork, which vents oxygen through eight apertures in its body, maintaining a vacuum between the surface of the wine and the outside air, and thereby preserving and maximizing a wines unique qualities for up to two weeks”. The vault holds up to 14 bottles, or 12 if you keep one vertical for viewing through the polycarbonate window to display the label. The inside is illuminated by six LEDs to prevent temperature change from the lighting, and is cooled using heat pipe technology to disperse heat without a lot of fan noise. It even features user-controlled temperatures so you can cellar your reds at 55-57 degrees and your whites at 45 degrees. Sounds like the perfect way to store and enjoy a growing wine collection.

[Oxygen Displacing And Cooling Wine Vault]

[Via: BornRich]

NEC System Technologies has developed a robot that tastes wine, can name the brand from a tiny sip, tell if that specific bottle has gone bad, and recommend a complementary cheese to go with each variety. Using an infrared spectrometer in its left arm, the robot fires a beam of infrared light, and analyzes the reflected light in real time to determine the chemical composition. The two foot tall green and white prototype can even tell you a thing or two about the taste, such as being a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz. Too bad it doesn’t actually drink the wine and then act robotically drunk after it polishes off a bottle or two.

[Red Orbit]

[Via: The Sporting LIfe]

[Via: Engadget]

[Via: CrunchGear]