Spit it Out

One important lesson I learned from my wine class is that I can’t spit, well neatly, that is. The instructors and other students seemed to spit nice condensed globs into their dump buckets. But not me. It was stringy and messy and trailing over my books. My sister compared it to the scene in Mulan when Mulan tries to imitate being a man. Pretty accurate description. I can agree that spitting is a necessary evil in tasting event. There’s no point in being too buzzed to know what you’re tasting. But here are two guidelines I would find helpful in preventing myself from making a mess:

1 Opaque cups are better than clear glasses. Do we really want to see what’s floating around in there?

2 Individual cups for everyone. Do we really want me leaning over other people when I have to spit?

En Guard!

Yes, I sabered a bottle of champagne. But no, it was not as graceful and smooth as youtube.com or any other member of my class would have you think. All week-long the instructor of my wine immersion class kept talking about how we would be sabering champagne. Unlike apparently everyone else in my class I had never heard or seen sabering done that I could remember. It’s done by running the blade along the seam of the champagne bottle and whacking the lip so theoretically the glass breaks and the champagne shoots out the end. The instructor kept stressing the dangers if you turn it towards someone (and one girl did actually have the cork shoot out prematurely on its own) and that if the wine was too cold the whole bottle might explode. But each person who went in class stressed how much easier it was than it seemed. One guy in my class even stated “I usually do it with a butter knife.”

Then it was my turn. It took me two bottles of champagne and all 4 seams.

First bottle, first seam: I nicked part of the lip off

First bottle, second seam: I couldn’t get anything. then my instructor took it from me, hit it and the entire neck flew off. He then explained I must have made a small hole on the other side so air was leaking so when it went it was going to explode. So of course now I’m even more nervous…

Second bottle, countless hits. Everyone told me I was doing it too weakly-well I am too weak! Additionally the bottle was too big for my hand and the condensation made it threaten to slip out of my hand so I couldn’t get a good grip. Somehow on the second bottle though I did manage to crack the glass but for some reason the cork didn’t shoot off as its supposed to. But after a second whack it finally did. Unfortuantely due to the 1 million attempts I made no one got a photo at the exact moment I got it: