Vino with Steve-O
Let's learn wine. It's party time!
Steve-O's Favs
Wine is great, but even better with the right tools. Here are some of my favorites.
​
Aervana is the original one-touch, luxury wine aerator. Many red wines need to “breathe” before they can be enjoyed at their best. Aervana dispenses and aerates your wine under pressure, providing more effective aeration all within an innovative “wine tap” format. Now, with Aervana, all it takes is one finger and the push of a button for perfectly aerated wine delivered straight to your glass. Instant aeration gives you the freedom to enjoy wine in any environment, in any quantity, both quickly and easily.
​
The Coravin Wine System lets you access, pour, and enjoy wine from a bottle – without pulling the cork. The bottle clamp with grips makes it effortless to attach the system to the bottle. By inserting the hollow needle through the cork and pressurizing the bottle with argon gas, any amount of wine can be poured. Once the desired amount is poured, the needle is removed, allowing the cork to naturally reseal itself. This keeps the wine free from oxidation and allows it to continue to age on its own.
Wine Folly, The Essential Guide to Wine
​
Simple, colorful, easy-to-read graphics make learning wine fun. Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack do a great job of guiding readers through the world of wine by wine style and varietal.
​
No celebration is complete without sabering open a bottle of Champagne. The Sciabola del Sommelier Champagne Sabre sports a brilliantly constructed handle, along with a tassel and a display stand. Be the envy of all of your friends!
​
Imagine this. It's a hot day, and you want to decant a wine a couple of hours ahead of time, but you want it to remain at cellar temperature until it's ready to drink. What do you do? This decanter is the best solution I've seen! It's got a "pocket" made of glass in which you can drop a couple of ice cubes to ensure that the wine stays at the perfect temperature without diluting the wine itself. Brilliant!
​
For those science nerds out there, here's a great way to visualize 184 of the most common grapes in a "periodic table" of sorts. The grapes are organized by body and acidity, and can lend a hand if you're looking to branch out and try some new varietals.
​
Keeping your wine at the correct temperature is imperative to maximizing its enjoyment. This gadget is clutch in making sure that your wine doesn't get too warm or too cold. It works similar to a Hydroflask, using vacuum insulated double-walled stainless steel to ensure that the wine stays at the perfect temperature.
VacuVin Wine Saver Vacuum Stopper
​
A Coravin is the best option to prevent your wine from oxidizing, but it's a bit of a luxury. This stopper by VacuVin allows you to extract the excess oxygen from the bottle with a pumping action, which should give you an extra day or two to finish the bottle if you throw it in the fridge. At about 10 bucks, you can't afford to not have one!
.jpeg)
Drinking from a well-designed glass is one of the greatest ways to enhance your wine-drinking enjoyment. I own more varietal-specific glasses than one person should have, but I rarely use any of them. Most often I choose my Gabriel Glas, which is a universal glass that, by all accounts, enhances the aromas of the wine. Gabriel Glas makes three different types of glasses: Gold Edition (thin and fancy hand-blown stems), StandArt (standard stems) and DrinkArt (standard stemless). The Gold Edition glasses are a splurge for wine connoisseurs, the DrinkArt are perfect for most people and situations, and while I usually don't recommend stemless, if you want to go that route, the stemless versions here are pretty cool and only cost about 1/3 of the stemmed DrinkArt glasses. These glasses are big enough to allow the wine to breathe, but not so enormous that you end up pouring in more wine than you thought and end up passed out on the floor!