3. LEARN HOW TO DRINK YOUR WINE
Once you finally do get around to enjoying your wine, you'll want to know how to drink it, of course. As easy as this sounds, you really should equip yourself with the right tools. For red wine, you'll want a glass with a large bowl and a relatively short stem. For white wine, you'll want a glass with a smaller bowl but taller stem. The whole theory here is that white wine is served chilled and thus should be kept away from the heat of your hand. Red wine, on the other hand, does well to be served just a degree or two below room temperature, so that it will release its heady vapors when it is warmed by the body heat in your hand.
Also, you may want to open any bottles of older red wine a few minutes before you intend to drink them. Pour off about half a glass and then let it sit, to allow the wine to breathe. By pouring off a little wine, you give a much greater surface area to both the wine in the bottle and of course in the glass, which allows it to mix with oxygen and to dissipate any stale air that may have collected in the bottle. Conveniently, it also lets you pick out the pieces of cork you may have bored into the wine in any clumsy attempts to uncork the thing.
Once you've taken a sip, you've just taken your first steps on an incredibly long journey to truly mastering wine. This can be an expensive journey, but a worthwhile one if you hope ever to truly enjoy meals in future. Before you get too far, though, check out this great beginners' guide:
As you start getting confidence, you'll start buying — and there are few better places to buy wine online than at wine.com. But to inform those purchases, pick up a more specialized knowledge of wine at WineSpectator.com. After all, there's only so long you can fake being a wine expert before being caught. We recommend that you use this cover only for as long as it takes actually to master vino.
