Top wine tips (anything you find particularly useful)

General
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The other day I was at a new friend’s house and her glasses were sparklingly clean (no red tinge from years of use). She told me that she uses Polident denture cleaner! Works marvellously well. It got me thinking - what other top tips do you have? A couple of mine…

  • Sensodyne non-whitening toothpaste will do away with tooth pain from tasting, heat and cold. (Non-whitening is key because the hydrogen peroxide or carbamide peroxide in whitening toothpaste results in increased sensitivity.)
  • Don’t brush your teeth immediately after tasting wine. Acid softens your enamel and you can damage it if you do so. Wait an hour.
  • Wine charms are excellent for keeping glasses sorted at parties.
  • The 20/20 rule (put red in the fridge 20 minutes before opening, take white out of the fridge 20 minutes before opening) is just about right depending on how hot it is outside.
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I have to add stainless steel beads for cleaning decanters (although, Sam, I also use denture tablets if we’ve had a particularly tannic red wine in a decanter for many hours)

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Also chalk pencils/white marker pens are useful for marking/numbering glasses. If you get the right kind, the marks wash off in the dishwasher.

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Y’all are keeping secrets from me! That denture tablet trick blew my mind!

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I like wax pencils to number the bottom of my glasses (you have to get used to writing the numbers backwards so they are easily readable when you turn them right-side up, but once you get the hang of it you can number lots of glasses while in their boxes or glass racks, and quickly pull them out when needed. The wax pencil rubs off easily after the tasting.

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I mentioned this in our December gift guide, Gifts for the wine-obsessed. It’s probably obvious to most people but it passed me by for way too long. If you use a foil cutter – the sort with little metal wheels inside a plastic horseshoe shape, or anything that works on a similar principle – it’s worth getting a new one every year or so. Mine gets heavy use and the wheels started to look like blunt octagons. The new one cuts through the foils like a hot knife through butter. (Mind you, I think it would be better if producers simply stopped using foils.)

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Re dental care, wine drinkers may like to take a look at our two articles on the subject. Wine and teeth revisited was published in 2012 as a supplement to the original 2008 one!

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Another tip which many people will doubt: if you come across a wine with TCA, the nasty odour reallly is dramatically reduced if you crumple up some clingfilm, stuff it into the bottle and swish it around.

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