Ansley 4AG

• Wine Gifts
• Personalized Wine Glasses
• Engraved Wine Glasses
• Personalized Champagne Flutes

Having worked for more than a decade in new product development for some of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies, I have always been fascinated with finding new solutions to old problems. Doing things the conventional way has always seemed boring to me. I crave innovation. There is nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a totally new approach that works better than anything anyone else has ever tried. A great example of this is the wine bottle.

People have been putting corks in wine bottles since the 1600’s when it replaced wood stoppers. Ever since then, there has been a need to pull the cork back out of the bottle. The usual method involves twisting a spiral piece of metal into the cork by hand and pulling. This method has also been around for hundreds of years. It’s lasted because it works. It’s a good and effective solution to the problem of removing a wine cork without breaking the bottle or spilling the wine.

But is the good old corkscrew the only way? Is it the best way or easiest way? Evidence presented at thetipsygrape.com in the form of many other solutions to this age old problem may convince you otherwise. Some of the many wine bottle openers presented there are clever variations of the old corkscrew, the Faucet Corkscrew for example makes opening a bottle of wine as easy as turning on the cold water in your kitchen sink. Like any superior product, though, its function is matched by an aesthetically pleasing design.

The Screwpull Trilogy Corkscrew goes one step further and even makes it easy to remove the cork from the corkscrew once you’ve opened the bottle. The Rabbit Corkscrew does the same thing, while allowing a wine bottle to be uncorked with little effort in as little as three seconds from start to finish. On the low-tech side, most of us are familiar with the Waiter’s Corkscrew which includes a lever and uses the rim of the bottom as a fulcrum of sorts to reduce the amount of effort require to pull the cork out, but even this design has been improved with the Rialto Double Lever Corkscrew which uses a similar principle, but keeps the force completely vertical relative to the bottle instead of pulling off at an angle like the Waiter’s Corkscrew.

My favorite, however, is the high tech solution. The Cork Pops Legacy III wine bottle opener doesn’t use a corkscrew technology at all. Instead, this unique and creative tool pierces the cork all the way through with a slender hollow needle. A touch of a button then sends pressurized inert gas through the needle and into the bottle. The pressure inside the bottle rises until it pushes the cork up and out of the bottle. This one is so unique, you may find yourself opening several bottles just to watch it in action.

If you’re at all like me, you’ll not only want to see all these innovative solutions at thetipsygrape.com, but you’ll also want to add one or more of them to your collection. Fortunately, you can do that at very affordable prices at www.thetipsygrape.com which also has a number of other wine-related products and accessories.

• Engraved Gifts
• Personalized Shot Glasses
• Personalized Beer Mugs
• Personalized Beer Glasses

My son loves Root Beer Floats. Every time we go out to a restaurant, he asks the waitress if they can make him a root beer float whether it’s on the menu or not. Most of the time, they will happily drop a scoop of vanilla ice cream into a mug of root beer for him without any problem. That’s because the number one rule of waitressing is that if the kids are happy, the parents are happy, and if the parents are happy, the tip makes the waitress happy. Words to live by.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I have found one of the gifts that I am buying for my son this Christmas. I am getting him his own personalized root beer float mug. I found a website that lets me design the exact engraving I want on the mug. It’s going to have a line around the outside that says

• Fill to this line with root beer
• Add one scoop of vanilla ice cream

It’ll also say "Billy’s Root Beer Float Mug" in a larger font across the top. This serves two purposes. First, he’ll like it. Second, it’ll end the root beer overflow mess that invariably happens when he adds to much root beer and the foam goes all over the kitchen counter. I guess in a way it’s a gift for his mother and me as well since we’ll be doing a lot less cleaning up.

The website where I found this idea is called glasswithatwist.com. They have a number of different types of glasses available, shot glasses, hurricane glasses, and all sorts of bar glasses. For the root beer float glass I am using their 25 ounce beer mug with a custom engraving. The site specializes in engraved glassware. They can even etch the glasses with custom clipart files that you send them via their website order form. If you’re not that creative, they also have a number of very clever standard patterns and sayings that you can customize with your own name. It’s a great idea for gifts or parties. I’m even thinking of having custom glasses for each of the kids at my son’s next birthday party. Root beer floats all around! Customized mugs or glasses really make a great party favor that will actually get used and last for a long time.

It’s nice to be able to get some of my Christmas shopping done early instead of waiting until the last minute for everything. The convenience of buying gifts online at websites like glasswithatwist.com is terrific. Choosing the items and having them shipped directly to my house makes it incredibly easy to shop. Usually I end up in the malls picking out whatever I can find and then deciding who I can give it to. With online shopping, I take the better approach of thinking of each person and what they would like. I know that I’ll be able to find just the right item online without having to run all over the state looking for specialty stores.