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Enjoying a fine wine should be more than just drinking. It should be a complete experience. Wine experts engage all their senses when tasting wines, but even beyond that, they use wine accessories to enhance the experience. Depending upon the wine, they may use such items as a decanter to allow the wine to breathe, a chiller to maintain the wine at just the right temperature, and may even engage in blind taste tests to compare different vintages.

All these accoutrements and many more are available from a single website devoted to serving both the casual and the serious wine drinker. Thetipsygrape.com has a selection of wine accessories that are both functional and fun. Let’s take an imaginary walk through an evening and see if you have all the right wine paraphernalia.

First, you invite friends over for a wine tasting event. During the day before the event, you may pull a book off the shelf to refresh your memory of all the fancy terms used to describe wine properly. You might choose The Unofficial Guide to Selecting Wine, or Wine for Dummies depending upon your current level of expertise. After a quick perusal of the appropriate tome, you select a few bottles from the wine rack. The white wines, need to be chilled and kept cold for serving, so you place them in a wine chiller. The reds can be served at room temperature, but perhaps one or two should be allowed to breathe before serving, so you pour them into a decanter and set them aside.

Since you decided to make the wine tasting a regular monthly event, you ordered etched wine glasses reminding guests that "The Oak Street Wine Tasting Club" is "Meeting the Second Friday of Every Month." You take out these glasses and place them around the table with themed cocktail napkins. Finally, the guests begin to arrive. Once everyone is there, you hide each wine’s label with the numbered bottle covers that come as part of the wine tasting kit. Using the most modern corkscrew you could find, you open the remaining bottles and begin to pour.

Once all the guests have tasted the wines and made their judgments, you remove the covers and reveal the wines. The party then retires to the den where everyone engages in a game of Wine-opoly, the wine themed board game. Since there is still some wine left-over at the end of the night, you use the VacuVin Saver Set to make sure the wine stays fresh until it is used up over the next few days.

The engraved wine glasses are carefully washed and placed onto the drying rack, since it just wouldn’t do to have spots on them. With that, the evening cones to a close, another successful event and a great excuse to get together with the neighbors for a night of fun once a month. Do you have all the wine accessories to pull this off? If not, visit Thetipsygrape.com where every single one of these items and many more wine gifts are available to be shipped right to your home.

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First, let’s define our terms. Champagne is sparkling wine, but there are very few sparkling wines that are champagne. While Canadians – and North and South Americans in general – have yet to acknowledge that champagne only comes from the Champagne district of France, European wine regions respect the convention.

The Spanish call their sparkling wine cava. The Germans call theirs Sekt, and the Italians, who have yet to make a final decision on the matter, call theirs classimo or metoda classico. In South Africa, it’s Cap Classique. Even French sparkling wines made in Alsace, Burgundy, Loire, Jura and Savoie, Rhone and Southwest France cannot be called “champagne,” and outside of the Champagne region the term vin mousseux (sparkling wine) is employed.
There are basically three ways to make a wine sparkle.

• The Champagne Method: You make a still wine and then give it a second fermentation in the bottle by adding a little sugar and yeast. The action of the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide is produced as a by-product. The closed bottle ensures that the gas has nowhere to go and gets bound into the wine. Since it is a very labor-intensive process, the product is expensive. It goes without saying that the quality is superior to sparkling wines made by other means.
• The Charmat Method: This process is a way to make sparkling wines in bulk. Developed by a French wine scientist named Eugene Charmat in 1910, this process is much less expensive and time-consuming than the champagne method, but the quality is inferior (and the bubbles are bigger). The principle is similar to the champagne method except that the secondary fermentation takes place in a large, sealed tank rather than a bottle. The finished wine is drawn off under pressure and then bottled.
• The “Bicycle Pump” Method: The product is injected with carbon dioxide in tank or on the bottling line before the closure is pushed home. This process is used for inexpensive pop wines. The bubbles last for about as long as it takes to consume a glass.

Spanish cavas are made by the champagne method, but they are much less expensive than French champagne. The costs of making cavas are much lower because the Spanish have developed machines to do the elaborate work of “cleaning up” the wine. In France, this part of the process – which involves shaking and tilting each bottle until the dead yeast cells settle on the cork – is called remouage, and it takes several weeks of movements by hand of highly skilled operators.

No beverage is as cruel as champagne or sparkling wine when it comes to showing up how clean your glasses are. Any dirt will cause the bubbles to cling to the side of the glass. Dishwasher film will have the same effect. Instead of tiny bubbles rising upwards in a continuous flow, fat lazy bubbles hug the side of the glass, clinging to the dirt. Be sure to have the glasses wiped with clean, lint-free towels or paper.

Any wetness in the glass will also cause problems. Water will kill the bubbles, so don’t wet the glasses and put them in the freezer for that chilled, frosted look. Not only will this turn the wine flat when it hits the icy sides of the glass, but it will bring down the temperature to a point where tasting is all but impossible. Any sparkling wine to be at the right serving temperature needs only 20 to 30 minutes in an ice bucket that has been half-filled with ice cubes and water.

Opening Champagne

The pressure inside a bottle of champagne is 90 pounds per square inch. If the bottle is warmed up or shaken, this pressure is increased. Once the wire muzzle under the foil has been removed, you have in your hand a live grenade with the pin removed.

A champagne cork, if left to its own devices, will eject from the bottle at a speed approaching 65 km per hour. So always keep your thumb over the cork until you remove it.

The way trained sommeliers open sparkling wine bottles so that there is no “pop” followed by an explosion of wine is to hold the cork in a stable fashion in one hand while gently twisting the bottle away from it in the other. Have a cloth handy in case the wine does bubble over, and make sure that the glasses are within easy reach so that you can pour immediately.

The bubbles in champagne and sparkling wines rise quickly in the glass and then settle back to the level of the liquid, so pour one-third of a glass and wait until the bubbles subside before pouring the rest.

Champagne Glasses

The worst glass for champagne is the one you see most frequently in movies: the one shaped like a saucer or ice-cream coupe. This shape will ensure that the wine warms up quickly (because of the large surface area) and will lose its sparkle. When you take a sip you’re in danger of giving your nose a bath. Legend has it that the coupe glass was designed for Queen Victoria who reacted badly to the gassiness of champagne. The glass was engineered to take the bubbles out of the wine as quickly as possible.

The best-shaped glass for all sparkling wines is a slender tulip or flute with enough of a stem so that your hand does not touch the bowl. The heat of your skin will warm up the wine and you will mask the inspiring sight of the bubbles rising.