Originally published on April 8, 2010.
A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: This trick still blows my mind.
Apparently my Things You Need to Know series is actually quite useful. The first one, How to Count Out a Cash Drawer, seemed to fill a big, gaping void in retail how-tos. Who knew there were so many people Googling this very topic?
This one is a little more wine-centric. It involves slow pours, the handy tool of the trade that allows you to, you know, pour slowly. Now in the real world, there’s no real reason why you would want your wine to pour slowly. But at a formal tasting, where you have many, many people tasting and just a few bottles for pouring, you can understand the need to pour the wine s-l-o-w-l-y. But it’s more difficult to pour wine slowly than you might think. And when you try to do it, you can look a little stingy. Slow pours solve this problem. You can dramatically tilt the bottle over the glass, hold it nearly vertical, and still, the wine…..pours……s-l-o-w-l-y. Without giving you the appearance of a stingy, wine-hoarding miser.
Slow pours are extremely simple to use. You just pop them into the top of a bottle. They even come with handy covers which make the wine easier to put into your purse and sneak out of the tasting.
Now these slow pours don’t cost much, maybe $0.50 per unit. But for some reason, everyone is loath to throw them out with the empty bottle. We like to take them with us, wash them out, and reuse them. But they’re tough to get out of the bottle. Fingernails don’t work. The edge of the blade on the corkscrew doesn’t work. Or it slices your finger. They’re pesky little devils.
But I learned a trick at a recent trade tasting. One of those tricks that is so painfully obvious you want to smack yourself on the head for not coming up with it on your own. It’s so obvious even a 5-year old could do it. (I know this because that’s my 5-year old’s hand in the picture below.)
It’s simple:
So, here’s the scoop on How to Remove Those Pesky Slow Pours (So You Can Wash Them Out and Reuse Them Because You’re Too Cheap Too Lose the $0.50)
1. Grab corkscrew
2. Insert back end into slow pour
3. Pull out slow pour
4. Smile smugly as the person at the pouring station next to you breaks a nail trying to do the same.
Or be nice and share the trick. Because good wine karma makes the world go round.