Okay then, Mr. Somm (and everyone else), I did a double take at that 4-6 drinkss a day statement, too. But then, who knows. Perhaps a glass of wine with each meal and snack, spread out over many hours daily really doesn't have the same cumulative effect as chugging a few beers each night. I don't know that the studies we hear about get that specific. It's might make a difference if the liver is slowly fed toxins vs. hit with a high level at once. Maybe the studies we know start with alcoholics and work backwards, which could make a difference in the findings (I have no idea, so just a random thought there). I'm sure other cultures have different drinking patterns than in the US and it *may* make a difference in health outcomes. *Woot! Zooms - nay -
strolls in a refined fashion, to the booze cabinet*
I have ordered
Wine for Dummies but in the meantime, I do have some wine dummy questions:
Is the wine in the little individual serving (screw top) bottles generally lower quality than equivalent-ish priced wine in a standard bottle (and a cork)? I'm usually the only one who drinks wine here so I buy the four packs of individual bottles. But I've started on the "real" bottles lately because I could swear they (all different kinds) taste better, have more different flavors or something. But that might just be in my mind, as I am easily impressed by the cork, haha.
Also, to go with this, I have ordered a couple of wine bottle stoppers that supposedly pump out the air. Do you think it makes any difference? I've always heard you are not supposed to save wine at all.
Also related to the above, does it change the taste of red wine when you refrigerate after opening? Would it be better to only buy white. Or no difference and just let the red warm up before drinking it?
And... if I bought "wine in a box," does it tend to be lower quality than corked bottled wine, in general?
I may be overly impressed with corks.
P.S. *Is* a cork any indicator that it's a better wine than a screw top bottle or is it just a tradition? What is the reason for the cork? Nothing else has a cork.
Cornflake: I'm happily link to it when I am next at a real computer. I'm traveling right now and answering from my phone. Also, I want to stress that this is one study that I cite because it is funny, and in my eyes, likeable. It's entirely possible another will come out to the contrary. My field of expertise is not wine and health, it's wine, and I read this one article because it's periphially related.
Fruitbat:
If you're interested in reading up, check out Karen MacNeil's "Wine Bible." It's extremely comprehensive, yet doesn't feel like an encyclopedia to read.
The size of the bottle, or it's presence in a box, is not in and of itself and indicator of quality. However, there are trends towards what kind of wines gets packaged in what sizes, so you are more likely to see better things in certain formats.
So, an underlying thing that relates to all your questions is that wine, like all other fruit, oxidizes with exposure to air. This is good up to a point and bad after a point. As you age wine (in a barrel at the winery or in a bottle in your cellar) one of the main things you are doing is allowing the wine to interact gradually with air, through the porous barrel walls or the cork. Like with anything else alive, there's point where it will start declining and eventually die (an easy metaphor is the bananas, avocado, or pear you left on the counter to ripen... too long and it will be brown and mushy, way too long and it will actually start decomposing) so don't take that as an implication that age universally = good.
So: the presence of a natural cork indicates that the winemaker believed it had aging in bottle potential after it was released from the winery. A synthetic cork it a screw top goes on wines that are ready to consume now. They're a little bit like sealing a carnival goldfish in a plastic baggie to bring it home: just fine for dispensing them in large quantity, but don't think it will survive forever cut off from air like that. (I'd drink synthetic corked or screw topped wetness within a year.) Cork is over-harvested, so I'm a big fan of only use it when necessary and recycling it afterwards (google recorkit for a company that does, lots of wine shops and restaurants have drop off points.) That all being said, some wines that do not have aging potential will still use natural corks in an attempt to look fancy, because lots of people are overly impressed by natural cork.
As for small bottles: ironically, the things you are most likely to find in small bottles are the two extremes. VERY expensive wines will release half bottles so that people who might hesitate at the price of the full bottle can have a option in their price range, she because you don't want to leave a bottle open forever without it going off from overexposure to air, so you can have half a bottle now and half a bottle later without rushing or risking over oxidizing the second half. But also, really cheap plonk will package itself in single serving four packs because marketing convenience and the ability to take to a picnic packed like a juice box is their only selling point. You can look for visual clues (serious wines in small bottles will be in miniature glass versions of the real thing and still cost twenty to sixty dollars or more. Plastic bottles in a cardboard pack with labeling like Mike's hard might be in small servings for a different reason...)
Your air pump is totally legit, as you've probably already construed from the other information. It simply lessens the amount of air inside the bottle and slows oxidation, making an open bottle last three to five days instead of going off overnight. It will still change slightly. If you open a fresh bottle of the same thing on day five and compare it to the one that's been re sealed, the latter one is much closer to going off. If you left a third bottle totally open it's well gone. An inexpensive place to experience the difference yourself is any restaurant with a wine by the glass that doesn't sell through the whole bottle very fast; all the time it happens where a customer is sold the last pour from a bottle that's been open and re sealed for several days, then when they order a second glass, obliging the bartender to open a new bottle, they exclaim over how different it is. Most restaurants and wine bars can easily show you the contrast on purpose if you ask the bartender to pour you both the last glass of something that's been open and the first glass of a fresh bottle of the same at the same time. Way cheaper way to learn about oxidation than to buy two bottles, open one and wait. You can probably also find a bottle of something that's been allowed to completely go off for comparison (which they shouldn't charge you to smell/taste of you really want to) because restaurants let stuff go off by accident all the time. Almost every other day I open some re sealed bottle that's been left too long that I have to discard rather than serve to a guest.
Gtg, work. Answer the rest later.