WE: How To Swirl Wine...

WINE TALK
1

In which WE teaches us how to swirl our wine:

Gotta be one of the most vapid articles they’ve ever published. Couldn’t help but laugh as I read it.
Tom

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Can’t believe they forgot to mention you have to swirl wine the opposite way when in the Southern Hemisphere.

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They may think their audience is made up of neophytes. There is also a beginners article on what to do at tastings (ask questions, swirl, spit). If you are starting out, all of this can be useful info to take the pretense out of the process.

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Well said. While a lot of it may be intuitive for most, not everyone has those experiences, and there’s often a perceived air of elitism in wine that can scare some from asking even the most basic of questions.

I’ve got no qualms with a publication like WE wanting to be inclusive and answering these types of questions for those who are just beginning to dip their toes in wine. We were all newbies at one point.

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5

Believe it or not, everyone in the world does not know how or why to swirl wine. Crazy huh?

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I’ve shown many friends how to do it over the years. They are fascinated by how such small circular movements at the base swirl the wine in the bowl so much. They usually take to it quickly.

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Well, you need to make sure with a red wine that you do not swirl too vigorously when standing near a white wall.

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Yup…that was a glaring omission in that article!!
Tom

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I suppose this article was not intended for us types, Jonathan. But it all seemed to be so simple that it didn’t need explaining even
to a neophyte. Maybe they should do an article on how to watch the bubbles in a sparkling wine??
Tom

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Maybe they know you are reading, and wrote it to annoy you. [stirthepothal.gif]

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Just watch your nearest aquarium…

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Whilst they talked of having a large bowled glass, I really think it would have been sensible to advise readers not to overfill it. Ordinary wine drinkers (i.e. not wine nerds like us lot) are more likely to fill a glass to at least half full and often quite a lot higher. This I presume arising from normal social norms of not being stingy on how much you pour for guests. Swirl a half full glass and there will be spillage.

A rough and ready measure might be 10-20% full, to allow for easy swirling.

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13

I was not born with the knowledge that I should swirl my wine.

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Well, Jonathan…most of us learn about drinking wine by drinking with others. And they invariably swirl their wine & we just learn
by mimicking them. Least that’s the way I picked up swirling a wine. I almost automatically swirl & sniff my water and orange juice
when I drink it.
Heck…if I recall right…I always swirled my baby bottle of milk!!
Tom

15

When I drank in college and grad school, I did not swirl. I did not observe that until sometime later. You seem to have had an early start. I don’t think you should extrapolate too much from that. As I said on another thread, people are different.

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16

I think the most informative part is swirling clockwise to open up the wine, and swirling counter-clockwise to close it back up. A very important distinction.

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17

Now I can stop using my chopstick

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18

Kind of reminds me of my misspent youth in the California oil fields. One of the old hands convinced a very gullible new hire that the pump jacks running clockwise were production wells, and the ones running counterclockwise were injection wells. Hilarity ensued until he radioed the foreman and told him all the wells were injecting, and wanted to know what to do. We spent the next few weeks of safety meetings learning how NOT to teach the new hires.

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19

Sorry, you got that backwards: it’s “Lefty loosey, righty tighty”

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Which is something to keep in mind when drinking Old World wine vs New World…