#SAZTIP Archives - SAZ in the Cellar

Wine Sense now available on KOBO!

Steve Shipley — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 21:58:30 +0000

InkIT Publishing has opened its horizons and broke with Kindle Unlimited to now offer Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine through the KOBO Online Bookstore. For those who love reading a great ePub, love the interactivity of dynamic table of contents, internal links to direct you where you want, and being able to link to external websites as referenced, then this is the reading experience for you. Beautifully formatted, with responsive design to read perfectly on any device regardless of size, and to navigate according to your desires, Wine Sense enables you to read what you want, when you want and how you want.

Wine Sense makes a handy eBook on your IOS or Android device and eReader to check out tips on the best way to buy wine, store wine, drink wine, appreciate wine and to get the most out of every wine drinking experience. To order your copy of Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine on KOBO, click any of the previous links in this post. If you are interested in Wine Sense, but want to buy it on iTunes or Kindle, then go to the page in this website entitled Ordering Wine Sense. Happy reading and happy drinking!

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How much is your wine worth?

Steve Shipley — Sun, 28 Jun 2015 05:12:56 +0000

“How much is your wine worth?” A good question and the answer is usually less than you think it is! However, in some cases, you may have a sought-after brand made in one of the best years and it can be worth much more selling it than drinking it. How can you find out how much is your wine worth?

One way to know is by studying research data bases, results of wine auctions and exchanges, and to put a great amount of time into this field of study. A simpler and more trustworthy way would be to review Wickman’s Fine Wine database of results. Wickman has been buying and selling wine for almost two decades and has achieved million of dollars in turnover for his customers. He has been tracking prices and actual sales results. I sold 500 bottles of wine through Wickman’s Fine Wines so far and have been pleased with the result. However, I had to do a bit of a level set as in some cases I spent more to purchase the wines than I was able to get selling them. But Wickman helped me understand and set the optimal price point to move the wine quickly. I have moved far greater volume through Wickman’s than Langton’s or other wine auction houses or exchanges because Wickman’s knows how much your wine is worth!

Check out Wickman’s data base and also his post on how to get the most from selling wine and the factors that influence wine sales.

And check out my previous post on the various outlets to consider if you want to sell your wine. But to find out how much is your wine worth, Wickman’s post and sales statistics for the major brands is the quickest way to do so.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, available now!
© 2015. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
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Vino DeCanto wine preserver not suitable for use

Steve Shipley — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 09:57:19 +0000

12 days ago, I provided a review on the Vino Decano wine preserver and gave it a mixed review. After another trial and use, I conclude it is not suitable for use. First and foremost with only a quarter of the bottle left in storage over the last 12 days, I could tell the wine had deteriorated slightly in quality. While it did a much better job over about 3.5 weeks than a manual pump would do, it is inferior to what an argon gas replacements is capable of. I was told they had tested and preserved wine for up to 14 months, but I find this hard to believe.

Operationally, it continued to disappoint. I was very cautious, yet still had problems determining how fast and how far to push the plunger; more importantly, I had wine dripping from the spout onto the counter for the next 30 seconds as it was settling back into the container. And to get all the wine out of the container, I had to completely disassemble the device and pour about 65 – 70 ml of wine into the glass. It is heavy to use and move about and was more effort to clean clean than I anticipated.

Unless future models are designed better and are easier to operate, I just cannot recommend this device as a wine preserver. The $229 I spent on it was a waste of money. I would continue to use a manual vacuum pump or consider using the Coravin or WineSave to preserve a good bottle of wine. My initial intrigue and the promise of this wine preserver has faded. The Vino DeCanto is a disappointment. I am back to using my manual pump and WineSave until my Coravin arrives!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, available now!
© 2014. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
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First review in on Vino DeCanto wine preserver

Steve Shipley — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:40:14 +0000

I attended the Newcastle Food and Wine show several weeks ago, and was intrigued and bought one of the very first Vino DeCanto wine preservers ever sold. Up until now, I have used a manual air extraction pump to preserve an open bottle of good wine for several days, but it certainly does not preserve wine for several weeks or longer. Vino DeCanto claims they have stored wine in the preserver for up to 14 months!.

I have been exploring buying an expensive four-bottle argon replacement system to keep up to four bottles of wine open for longer periods of time and have also been reviewing the use of WineSave and Coravin. WineSave is an argon replacement unit which is good for about 50 applications. Coravin is unique in that it sticks a fine needle through the cork of a bottle, extracts the amount required and then replaces the wine with argon gas. The Vino DeCanto operates differently in that it does not replace the empty space with argon (or similar) gas, but rather eliminates the space all together by using a plunger with an O-ring sealer to keep the remaining wine away from air.

Now that I have used it several times, I feel comfortable providing a review of my findings.

The positives:

The Vino DeCanto does the job as advertised and preserves the wine. I had approximately a half-bottle of 1998 Lindeman’s St. George Cabernet Sauvignon (a most outstanding wine BTW!) in the Vino DeCanto for 14 days and it tasted as fresh as when I opened the bottle. It had not lost fruit, had not turned brown nor in any other manner look or taste different than when I opened it. The Vino DeCanto does the job!
You do not need to continue to buy argon capsules to fill wine bottles; therefore your initial investment in the Vino DeCanto is your entire investment.
The Vino DeCanto is beautifully engineered, of very high quality and quite attractive to look at.

The negatives:

The Vino DeCanto preserver is heavy and somewhat cumbersome to move around.
You can only use it for one bottle at a time, whereas WineSave or Coravin can be used on multiple bottles you have opened. Therefore, if you want to keep several bottles open at a time, you need to purchase several Vino DeCantos.
It is operationally difficult to use without squirting wine out of the top or dripping from the spout. Even after several uses and being careful about what I was doing, I still had a small mess to clean up each time I have used it.
The height of the Vino DeCanto is less than the height of a typical red wine glass, so you either need to mount the device on a stand or hold the glass at an angle underneath the spout.
It is difficult to judge how long to push the plunger for as the wine trails for a while after you stop pushing the plunger, so it is easy to overfill the glass

I purchased my Vino DeCanto for Aus $229 at the show price. It is expected to retail for around $300. WineSave costs about $35 and is good for approximately 50 applications before you need to buy another one. Coravin costs about $300 and the replacement capsules cost around $10 (more or less based on how many you) buy and are good for around 15 uses per capsule. Both WineSave and Coravin can be used on as many bottles as you have opened. I have not used the Coravin myself, but several friends, including some of Sydney’s top sommeliers have and swear by it.

Given the price, limitation of only being able to use it on one bottle at a time, and the operational challenges I encountered with the Vino DeCanto, I am unlikely to buy another one unless I can be convinced it is easier to use than I have found it. I may be looking at the Coravin as my ongoing solution to preserving fine wines.

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How do we taste wine? Ask Maurice O’Shea

Steve Shipley — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 07:56:57 +0000

How do we taste wine? How do we appreciate what wine has to offer? As explained in my upcoming book Wine Sense, we taste wine through our senses. The concept of taste is cross-modal, using our eyes, our nose and our mouth. Tasting wine comes together through all the human senses. But four senses prevail when appreciating wine. Sight, smell, taste (specifically through our taste buds) and mouth feel. But our sight is so predominant, it often overrules what we experience with our nose and our mouth. This sometimes causes stimulus errors which deceive us when drinking wine. Wine Sense teaches us how to smell and taste wine better. It provides an understanding and techniques you can use to trust what is in your nose and what is in your mouth. Many believe they can never achieve this, but I do and that is why I have made the effort with Wine Sense in an attempt to help you to gain trust in your nose and mouth.

Maurice O’Shea was one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, best wine makers. He also had bad eyesight. I am reading Campbell Mattinson’s great book on O’Shea entitled Wine Hunter. It tells of O’Shea having just found out he cannot join the French army in WW1 because his eyesight is so bad. Happy about this turn of events (which allowed him to study viticulture and winemaking), he shouts a nice meal out for his friends in Montpellier. They allow the chef to prepare what he likes. They are happy, eating and drinking, but O’Shea realizes the texture and taste of the meat to be different, even though his friends do not. They later find out they have been eating domestic cat as meat is scarce during the war in France.

As Mattinson relates of young Maurice: “he wondered whether his taste and smell had grown more acute as his eyes had dimmed, as if his other senses had become heightened, as if his sense of smell and his sense of taste had developed into his gift.” Mattinson goes on to describe what O’Shea learned about himself that night: “and he knew something in himself that he had not known before – he could trust his mouth. He could trust his nose. He could feel the taste of things that others could not.”

Until you learn to trust your nose and your mouth, you will be sold wine, you will be told how to taste wine, and you will be told what you like by others. When you learn to trust your nose and your mouth to taste wine, you then learn to truly enjoy and appreciate wine more. And as O’Shea points out, by dimming your sense of sight, you can attune your nose and mouth more acutely. You can learn from others, especially when drinking in the presence of others who know more about wine tasting than you do. Learn from them, but learn to trust your nose and mouth.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, due out July 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
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Don’t be caught out by wine stimulus errors

Steve Shipley — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 04:23:57 +0000

My upcoming book Wine Sense describes what a wine stimulus error is and how to avoid them. A wine stimulus error occurs when conditions around us play a significant part in our assessing a wine’s taste and quality. This is especially true when our sense of sight is involved as it is so predominant over our gustatory senses of smell, taste, and feel. We are so confident in what we perceive through sight that it overrides what we experience through our other senses. Sometimes people selling wine intentionally create stimulus errors to entice us to purchase more or pay a higher price than we should. (This topic is discussed in detail in Wine Sense, Chapter 17: Buying and Storing Wine.) Typical visual stimulus errors you should be aware of and consciously avoid include:

Assessing wine sealed with cork as being better than wine sealed with screw cap
Assessing wine in a box being worse than wine in a bottle
Viewing a fancy or imported label as containing better wine than those with simple label
Being tricked to believe white wine with red wine dye tastes like red wine
Dark, aesthetic settings (cellar door tasting rooms) for tasting wine we are considering buying increases our perception of higher quality wine
Providing leniency and over-rating a wine when we are in the presence of the winemaker, other winery staff or so-called ‘experts’ who are proclaiming the wine excellent when it is not

Up until about five years ago, these last two points above have caused me to buy wine or overpay for wine which did not taste nearly as good when I opened a bottle under different circumstances a few months later. I had been deceived by the surrounding ambiance and ‘expertise’ of those with me. While conducting research for this book, I was surprised how much research I found on designing wine labels. This is an extremely large field of study and there appears to be more courses on wine label design than there are on wine making and vineyard management. The industry knows how important wine label design is on wine sales and they work hard at getting labels right. Some people cannot bring themselves to drinking a cleanskin wine (bottle of wine without a label affixed) even if they have confidence they know what wine is in the bottle. They have a preconceived notion that cleanskins are made from low quality grapes (otherwise, why would it be a cleanskin?). I know people who have dismissed extremely fine wines out of refusal to drink anything without a label affixed to it even when the provenance supports the wine in the bottle to be of high quality.

Is the wine in the glass in the photo above any better because it is being served by some good looking dude in a fancy jacket in the vineyard? No, but you probably will taste it and think it is better than it really is! With more experience and practice, you develop more confidence and can avoid getting caught out by wine stimulus errors. Have confidence in what you are tasting, not what the label, the color of the wine or those around you are saying!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
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Save all wine sales receipts – this week’s #SAZTIP

Steve Shipley — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 08:02:28 +0000

Most of us buy wine with the intent of consuming it. We do not expect to sell wine off in the future. I certainly did not plan on it, but then I found myself in a position where it made sense to sell off a lot of my wine. There are many plausible reasons you may elect to sell off wine, including:

Your taste has changed and you like different styles now
Your health has changed
You find you have wine coming to end of life and will not be able to drink it in time
You may just want to free up cash and realize that wine sales is a good way to raise funds

And if you do plan to sell wine, you will be glad that you saved all your wine sales receipts! There are several good auction and exchange firms to handle your selling needs (one of the best is Wickman’s Fine Wine Auctions), but most of them (and the ones you want to be doing business with) require provenance. Provenance is proof that the wine has been stored under optimal conditions throughout its life and has the very best chance of being cared for as well as any bottle can be. And the best source of provenance is your wine sales receipts along with journal entries and time-stamped photos of you taken delivery of the wine and immediately putting the wine in proper storage. But the most important thing is your wine sales receipts. It proves you bought the wine directly from the winery or a major wine retailer with some certainty the wine has been looked after properly up to the time you took possession of it. To further strengthen provenance, you should have records of when you build or secured your cellar, have photographs of it and the wine in the cellar and records of having placed the wine in the cellar. But none of this matters if you have not saved your wine sales receipts!

And even if you are certain you will never sell off wine in the future, your wine sales receipts provide a record of what you paid for wine which is useful in terms of understanding wine values and how much to pay for wine in the future. It does not take a lot of effort to save your wine sales receipts. If you are uncertain if you will need them, throw them into a box and store them for potential future use. At least you will have them if you require them later.

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Buying fine wine on the cheap is this week’s #SAZTIP!

Steve Shipley — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 06:34:35 +0000

We kicked off #SAZTIP (SAZ in the Cellar Tip of the Week) last Thursday by showing people how to get wine out of a bottle when the cork is stuck inside. This happens rarely, but is useful to know. This week’s tip is useful every time you buy wine, and it is about buying fine wine inexpensively! In my upcoming book, Wine Sense, I admit to having overpaid for wine by 25% – 35% until recently. I get far better wine values now than I did previously, and doing so while buying better quality wine. Wine Sense spends an entire chapter discussing how to buy and store wine and highlights a number of things to ensure you are buying fine wine inexpensively. Key tips to help you achieve buying fine wine on the cheap, include:

Don’t buy wine retail, or if you do, only do so when they have at least a 20% off sale and you are getting one or two bottles free for every half-dozen you buy. These type of sales are always on.
Buy at auction. There are a number of fine auction houses and you can get some great wines for a fraction of the cost you otherwise would have to pay. Just make sure to check the wine provenance before buying.
Buy 10 – 15 year old fine wines instead of new vintages. They are drinkable sooner and someone else has paid the price for cellaring. Vintage wines are usually no more expensive than current vintages and you are more certain as to how they have matured.
Use Wine-Searcher for free or Wine-Searcher Pro for $39 per year to get the prices of all wines globally to compare. I have found 400% – 500% variances in prices for fine wines.

There is an abundance, dare I say ‘glut’ of fine wine on the market. Look to secondary markets to get the best buys and use Wine Searcher to find the best values.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014. Steve Shipley
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Using chopstick for pouring wine when cork stuck in bottle – #SAZTIP

Steve Shipley — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 05:23:56 +0000

What do you do when you have a cork stuck in a bottle? I have had the privilege recently to be drinking a number of bottles of wine that have been more than 25 years old. The only problem is that 25-year or older corks tend to be very soggy and are extremely difficult to remove from the bottle. The only way to be in with a chance with such an old cork is to use the Ah So corkscrew which has two prongs on the outside of the cork to provide enough friction to squeeze the cork, pulling it from the bottle’s neck. Using a center-drilling corkscrew would almost certainly destroy the cork splitting it into little bits. This is a concern in that the cork pieces are small and difficult to clean up and more importantly, you have likely introduced small cork pieces into the wine itself. While you can filter the cork bits out, it is not recommended, as the wine likely has a weak structure and could be damaged by filtering.

I had two bottles recently where the cork slid into the bottle intact, no matter how I tried to remove it. While the cork floats, if the bottle is full, the cork does not have enough air space to get out of the way when the bottle is turned over to pour. The cork wedges into the bottle neck making it impossible, or at least extremely slow and difficult to pour the wine. However, there is an easy way to deal with this – just use a chopstick! The chopstick, stuck into the bottle, easily clears enough room, getting the cork out of the way. You can then easily pour the wine into a glass or decanter and the problem is solved.

If this happens though, you should immediately empty the bottle into a decanter and then refill in another bottle (without the cork) to ensure any possibility of cork taint (not already introduced through the wine touching the bottom of the cork while cellaring) is not worsened.

A cork stuck in the bottle has happened to me about seven times now, but fortunately I have always had a chopstick on hand to help me out!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013. Steve Shipley
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Introducing #SAZTIP wine tip of the week

Steve Shipley — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 03:10:13 +0000

SAZ in the Cellar is now publishing three times weekly:

Sundays (Australia Sydney time) will feature reviews of wine, wineries, wine-related products, events and food / wine pairings
Tuesdays (Australia Sydney time) will be used to re-publish all-time favorite posts (from almost 200 posts over the last two years!) or posts associated with the wine lifestyle
Thursdays (Australia Sydney time) will feature #SAZTIP – a weekly tip to improve your wine drinking

#SAZTIP posts will focus on how to improve wine tasting, storage, purchasing and anything that make wine drinking a better experience! Even if you miss a post, you can just enter the #SAZTIP hashtag to find all posts and what others are saying about the posts. Finally, if you have a wine tip you want SAZ in the Cellar to share, just place the hashtag #SAZTIP in your tweet or post and we will pick it up. If judged to be worthy of sharing with others, we will do so and source it as your idea and contribution!

I am not sure if this will take off or not, but I want to use #SAZTIP to generate a community of wine related tips for everyone to use and learn. There are many wine-related hashtags including #wine, #winelover, etc. so it is a crowded and noisy space. But as SAZ in the Cellar grows and Wine Sense is released early in 2014, hopefully there will exist a body of wine drinking tips you can count on to improve your wine drinking.

#SAZTIP #1 will be released in a few hours and show you how to use a chopstick to pour wine from a bottle when the cork is stuck inside.

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