Wine Tricks

I've always had an affinity for pretty wine bottles. When I was younger, my parents and my siblings would give me their empty wine bottles so I could collect them, and I loved every single one.

Bad news, guys. The shelf life for liquor leftovers does not apply to your two-buck chuck. While an opened bottle of your favorite whiskey will stay respectable for ages thanks to its high ABV (which makes it inhospitable to outside elements), an opened bottle of merlot will sour quickly. However, it turns out that red and white wines have different life spans once they're opened—for reasons which we'll cover below.

While most people build collections of things with intrinsic value such as coins, stamps, or rare post cards, I collect wine corks—the natural ones, not the plastic kind. Corks are a natural product harvested from the cork oak tree. It takes the better part of 10 to 12 years before a tree can have its bark manually removed for the production of cork. Thankfully, no tree is harmed in the process and in 12 years, the tree bark can be harvested yet again.

Holidays are a time for good food and good drink, but more often than not, we substitute good drink for, well, cheap drink. However, cheap wine doesn't have to be bad.

Buying and drinking wine can be intimidating. There's so much to know, and so many ways to reveal your ignorance. If you're completely befuddled by wine and how to describe it, don't worry, you're not alone.

An open bottle of wine can be dangerous. You intend to enjoy—nay, savor—a single glass, but then two episodes of Top Chef later, that sucker is empty. Now you have to go to work the next day with a wine hangover. What happened?