I have been a bit airy-faery of late, mouthing off about elegance, the nature of language, bonhomie, and the like. Which, I must say, I prefer talking about at dinner where there is plenty room to bang my fists on the table. And as the banging of digital fists becomes slightly tiresome, I thought I would veer off in a more practical direction. So here are a few tips to making your wine drinking life more pleasurable.

Spend more money

Do it. Drop some cash on your next bottle. I hate to break it to you, but the odds of finding a wine that blows your socks off for under a hundred bucks is pretty slim – unless you have the expectations of a newt and the budget of a pauper. Sure you might find an altogether decent wine, even a very good one. But really good wines, the ones that make you pump your fist, make you tingle; the wines that you want to get to know, consider, understand, take to bed, marry, fuck on silk sheets in a down-town Bombay motel – these wines you have to pay for.

Go exotic

Now that you are willing to spend a little more tom on your next bottle, may I suggest you try something other than a South African wine. While we make loads of brilliant, thrilling wines, it is always good to expand your palate. If you are out in the wine lands pop in at Glen Carlou, they sell some good Aussie Rieslings and Semillons and a few Argentinean Malbecs. There are also some interesting New Zealand and Aussie wines for sale at Dombeya, but the best place to buy wines from foreign shores (in Cape Town, at least) is Wine Cellar in Observatory. If you are in Joburg try Reciprocal, I have heard good things. Life’s too short to drink only South African wines.

Use a decanter

It doesn’t have to be a fancy-pants, oddly shaped art piece, hand-blown by virgins, blessed by monks, and houses some archaic deity. All you need is a big glass container that you can pour out of. I currently use a vase. The reason for decanting (apart from hiding your cheap-ass bottle form the table) is to give wine time to breath and open up. By exposing more of the wine to oxygen it gives it a sort of faux-ageing. It’s not just for reds, you can decant any wine. The younger the wine the longer you decant it for. Decant that Sauvignon Blanc – you may be pleasantly surprised.

Get the temperature right

Simple story. When wines get warm, they get kak. I am sure you have heard this all before, but here is a rough guide to wine serving temperatures, all in degrees Celsius:

Sparkling wine, Sweet White Wine: 5-8

Rose, crisp dry whites: 6-8

Oaked Whites, light Reds: 9-12

Red Wine: 14-17

Remember, it is easy to warm up a wine when it is in the glass, but incredibly difficult to cool down without adding ice. Unless of course you are that icy bitch I… Err, never mind. By the way, there is nothing wrong with adding ice. I hate warm wine. Heat to wine is what midnight was to Cinderella’s coach:a fucking disaster.

Glassware

Get some good stuff. There are glass companies that offer specific glasses for specific wines. So Bordeaux has a specific glass, Burgundy another; Riesling gets its own one, as does Chablis, and on and on. I am not going to recommend you go that far, but drinking out of decent glasses does make for a better drinking experience. Size matters here. You want a big glass that gives you room to swirl without your wine flying out and landing all over the hot blond/brunette/redhead/etc you’ve invited round for a quiet dinner – this has happened to me and unfortunately it didn’t end with me being able to lick it all off. Just a rather embarrassed silence. Not only should your glass be of the right size but also the correct girth. What you want is thin glass, and preferably without the slight lip you sometimes find around the rim. Big, thin, no lip.

While I am a big fan of good glassware I think it needs to go with the wine you are drinking. I far prefer drinking an unassuming little Chenin out of a tumbler than I do out of a fancy Riedel. A glass is not going to make a wine better, but the right one will show it at its best. If you are beside a river with a beautiful partner and the bubbly is cooling in the water, then no glasses are needed at all; neck that shit from the bottle.

Read

When you buy that pricey bottle find out why it is pricey. Where it comes from, what makes it different, uncover its back-story. I bang on about this quite a bit, but the more you learn about wine the more you will enjoy it.

Open that bottle

Loads of people have a couple bottles lying around waiting for a special occasion. Open that bottle. If the wine really is special, the opening and drinking of it should be occasion enough. Open that goddamn bottle. If you are worried it might not be ready, post the name of the wine in the comments and I’ll tell you whether or not you should open that bottle.

So there are few tips for you. None staggeringly original, but all useful, and used by me. Drink new wines, spend more money, be merry, have a laugh, learn a bit, get drunk. That’s what wine’s about. Oh, and, open that bottle.

Do you have any top wine tips?