Online wine retailers have the advantage that they don’t incur many of the costs (such as rent, heating, lighting and shop floor staff) experienced by traditional wine merchants, meaning that they can offer you cheaper wine. Similarly, whereas a high street wine shop or a supermarket may be restricted by shelf space when it comes to displaying wines, online wine retailers don’t have that problem. This means a far greater choice of wine for you.
One of the key things that sets Internet wine retailers apart from traditional wine merchants is the fact that you can buy wine from the comfort of your armchair. With no parking hassles, car journeys or closing times to work around, you’ve got total freedom and flexibility to buy wine when it suits you best. And once you’ve ordered you wines, you don’t have to move an inch to receive them. Online wine retailers pride themselves on wine delivery direct to your door, so forget the heavy trolleys and cars to unload.
A drawback with high street wine merchants is that when you find yourself in a small, intimidating environment you are more likely to be pressurised into buying something you don’t really want. Buy wine direct from an online wine retailer however and you won’t feel this uneasiness. Simply spend as long as you need browsing and researching the wines in your own time, knowing that help is there should you need it.
Online wine retailers also have the advantage that they can more easily tailor the shopping experience to your tastes and preferences. So whilst you’ll be faced with rows and rows of wines to look through at your local supermarket or wine shop, with an online wine store you can usually very quickly filter out the wines that you dislike. More sophisticated websites often tailor what you see to your preferences, or encourage you to sign up to emails that are based around the type of wines that you are likely to be interested in.
Finally, it’s worth considering the quality of the wine. Internet wine merchants are unlikely to be swayed by the producer’s buying influence in the marketplace, as shelf space isn’t an issue. So instead of big branded mass-produced wines which tend to line the shelves of the supermarkets, Internet wine retailers are likely to look beyond the purchasing power, which leads to a greater selection of more original wines for you.
Admittedly, it has not all been plain sailing with the Internet, with consumer concerns about online security and limited take up in the early years. But with developments in technology quickly overcoming these barriers, it’s not hard to see why more and more consumers are fleeing the high streets in favour of online shopping. Virgin Wines is one example of an online wine retailer that has benefited from this trend, with an enormous sales growth in recent years. To find out more, visit our site.
Janiya
Virgin Wines believes in selecting handcrafted, boutique wines especially for you. We steer clear of big brands, famous names and popular labels. Why? Because we want to offer you the best value wines possible and you won’t get that from mass produced, heavily marketed wines. So instead, we look to bring you the most exciting, best quality wines from up and coming, undiscovered winemakers. Pure gems just for you.
When you sign up to the Virgin Wines’ Discovery Wine Club, you’ll become part of a personalised approach to buying wine. We recognise that all our customers are different and like different wines, so that’s why we pick out a unique selection of wines for you to enjoy each quarter. What’s more, we offer two levels to our wine club, so you can choose to join the plan that suits you best. Should you wish to make further purchases of wine, we have a dedicated team of wine advisors on hand to help you personally with your wine recommendations. In addition, we have developed unique technology that will allow you to see only the wines that we think you will love when you sign in to our website.
Virgin Wines believes in providing our customers with as much information as possible about our wines. And honest information at that. Every week we add over 1000 unedited consumer wine reviews to our website. Why? Because it helps you with your wine choices, and helps us learn which wines to buy more of.
As a thank you for joining our wine club, you will enjoy a number of member benefits, such as a half price wine club welcome case. And that’s not all. You’ll also receive a saving of 20% on future Discovery Wine Club cases, plus an exclusive opportunity to buy extra supplies of wine at a 15% discount off the regular price customers pay.
Finally, when you sign up to the Virgin Wines Discovery Wine Club you can rest assured that you are in complete control. There’s no fixed term contracts or hidden charges to contend with. If you decide that you want to skip a case or even cancel your wine club membership, just tell us and we’ll be pleased to assist. If we’re about to send you a wine in your case that you don’t like the sound of, we’ll change it. And if you then don’t like the wine after you’ve tasted it, we’ll refund it with our “no questions asked money back guarantee”. No problem.
The Virgin Wines Discovery Wine Club isn’t just any old wine club. It’s different. Personalised. Flexible. And what’s more, you can rest assured that you will be getting a whole host of benefits to help you get the most out of your wines. To find out more, visit virginwine(dot)com
Fiona
All Wine accessories have its special features. For wine cooling, we have wine coolers, wine buckets, ice buckets, Wine Sceptre, Champagne Bowl, and very unusual wine Cool Bags. Rapid Ice Wine Cooler and rapid ice champagne cooler are also offered. Also we have Slimline Wine Cooler with cabinet which can be used in kitchen to store your wine bottles. Sometime we need to wait for hours for our red wine to reach the correct temperature, so for this we have introduce Wine Warmer Therm au Rouge. This is unique energizing gel gently warms up your wine in a controlled and sophisticated way.
We also wine tasting accessories such as wine tasting glasses, Clef du Vin, Blind Tasting Cover, I.S.O Tasting Glass, Spiegelau glasses, Spittoon Bucket for all wine tasting from Club to Trade. An essential wine measures and spirit measure in stainless Steel with govt stamped are also supplied.
We have huge wine decanters stock which gradually keeps changing everyday. Captain decanter, Ship Decanter, claret jug, hogget decanter, wine decanting cradle, decanting cradle in brass, and silver plate are main decanters preferred by wine accessories customers. Most attractive and useful decanting funnels and aerators are also offered. For outdoor trips we have good selection of hip flasks, Pewter hip flasks round and rectangular, Hip Flask - Leather Captive, and Pewter Hip Flask Funnel. Be different and order a Wine Tastevin such as Burgundian Tastevin or a Plain Wine Tasting Bowl Serpent Handle Tastevin or even a Pewter Quaiches. We also offer the Vacu Vin Wine Saver, Wine Preservers and Wine Breathers which is necessary for keeping your opened bottles fresh.
Other mostly commonly used wine accessories are wine glasses, champagne glasses, Champagne flutes, wine cellar accessories, wine cellar book, wine cellar Hygrometers, and wine cellar thermometers, Champagne Accessories, Cocktail Accessories. Then we have wine pourers, bottle pourers and drip rings, wine bottle stoppers, wine bottle coasters, wine table mats, wine openers.
All range of Corkscrews from simple to exotic such as lazyfish corkscrew, Bar- Mounted Corkscrew, Screwpull Corkscrew, electric corkscrew, winemaster corkscrew, air pump corkscrew, laguiole corkscrew, Wall-mounted Corkscrew and many more in corkscrew is offered by Fine wine Accessories in UK.
For excellent wine Pourers, we have Wine pouring baskets, wine pouring cradles, Universel’ Pouring Arc, Chrome Plated Pouring Arc, Silver Plate Wine Pouring Basket, and Pewter Wine Pouring Cradle.
Whether you are looking for wine accessory for yourself or wine accessory gifts for birthday presents, wedding present, or Christmas presents, Fine wine accessories offer different kind of wine accessory for different budget.
Visit our miscellaneous gifts category for unusual wine presents such as key rings, salt and pepper mills and grape scissors, tastevins, Laguiole corkscrews in presentation boxes, key ring sized hip flasks, crystal decanters, decanting cradles, wine cooler bags, wine picnic baskets, and wine savers etc. Classic champagne sabres are an ideal presents for men and wine lovers.
Hurry up wine lovers, browse and order your wine accessory today either by online or by visiting our shop or by phone.
Kelsey
Some of these wine accessories are essential, like a good corkscrew, but the others you’ll probably get just for the fun of it. They’re in no particular order and even if you have no intention of getting any of these (except the corkscrew of course!), and you do actually manage to restrain your buying impulses, it’s fun to read through the list to see what’s available.
Corkscrew; Essential if you’re to open your bottles of wine. Comes in many shapes and designs.
Wine Rack; There’s more than one way to store your wine, and a wine rack is one of the best ways to do this.
Wine Decanter; This glass decanter allows the wine to aerate before drinking it.
Wine Glasses; These too, are an essential item in your wine drinking efforts. The effort should be made to find the correct wine glasses
Stopper; These little gadgets are the best way to stopper your wine after it’s been opened, and they also come in many different shapes and designs
Champagne Flutes; Champagne is best tasted using these specially designed champagne flutes.
Double Wall Stainless Steel Wine Cooler; Double walled stainless steel wine cooler in an elegant heavy duty, high luster collared thermal cooler. Seamless finish all around.
Double Wall Stainless Steel Wine and Champagne Cooler; This stainless steel container is semi-brushed, double walled and straight sided. This container can store either wine or champagne. It doesn’t have a collar and it is seamless.
Rapid Ice Wine Quick Chiller; This cools the wine quickly to serving temperature. You can keep your cooled wine in here for 3 hours. You slip cooling jacket over the bottle and very quickly you will have a chilled wine.
Electronic Infrared Wine Thermometer; You can use this device to find the temperature of the wine before you de-cork it. The infrared technology allows you to see the temperature of the wine in the bottle and in your glass.
Wine Aerator; This device works by letting air bubble into your wine thus cutting down the time that the wine needs to breathe. Softens wine tannins fast.
Black Leather Corkscrew Holder; A classic leather holster that is specially made to be able to carry all waiters’ sized corkscrews. It is made of pure leather and it straps onto any belt.
Corkscrew and bottle stopper; This corkscrew is made from Rosewood. You can use it to uncork a wine bottle or to seal /stop up the bottle
Waiter’s Corkscrew; You open the wine bottle by ratcheting the cork slowly out of the bottle. The process is somewhat like a car jack.
Pine Cellar Cube; This wine rack is easy to stock and it is expandable. The sturdy cubes are made from ¾ inch solid pine. There are four separate compartments for you to store your wine.
Bottle Tasting Table; This table wine rack will hold up to 110 bottles. The top surface of the wine rack serves as a table top. Here you can serve wine and other food pieces, wine glasses and other items that you will need for your wine tasting experience. This bottle tasting table is made from solid Canadian pine.
Avanti Dual Zone Mini Wine Cellar; There are separate compartments for red and white wines. You will find separate temperature controls for each section. You can store 10 bottles in the top section and 18 bottles in the bottom section. There is an interior light that lets you see what is in the mini wine cellar.
Shelf Mounted Glass Hanging Rack; This hanging glass rack can be self mounted. It will easily hold 20 glasses.
Glass Cleaning Brush; You pour a small amount of water into the glass. The brush uses the water in a swilling action to clean the glass.
Ice Bucket; Made of double walled stainless steel. This container provides a good insulation with minimum chilling temperature loss. The silicone sealing ring in the lid provides the bucket with a secure closure.
Professional Bar Glass Wash; This glass wash is made from natural ingredients like plants and salts. It doesn’t contain any solvents or harsh chemical and it is completely bio-degradable. You will not get the taste and smell of any cleansing agent with this item.
Jordyn
Temperature
White and rose wines are best slightly chilled, at 50 degrees. Check that temperature is satisfactory. It is better for the wine to be too cold than too warm for either red or white. It isn’t improper wine etiquette to request an ice bucket to chill both whites and reds; so don’t hesitate to do so if that is how you would prefer to enjoy the wine. However, placing the bottle in an ice bucket can compromise your experience; fine white wines will release more texture and bouquet as they warm up in the glass; try it. Drinking a modest wine on a hot day would be the exception. A red wine that is brought to the table slightly chilled would be an indication of good storage; you can always warm up the wine by cupping the glass in your hands and swirling.
Cork
It is proper wine etiquette for the sommelier to present the cork to the person who requested the wine when the bottle of wine is opened. The vintage on the cork should match the vintage on the bottle. A pristine looking cork can stopper a bad wine and a delicious wine can come from a cork that disintegrates as it’s removed, so a visual inspection of the cork often reveals little. By sniffing the cork you’re actually smelling the bark of a tree which may be the earthy aromas you are encountering. Many a good bottle of wine has been mistakenly returned because there is mold on the top end of the cork. This has no effect on the wine; it simply means the bottle was aged in the producer’s damp cellar prior to release, which is a good thing.
Swirl & Sniff
Proper wine etiquette procedure dictates that the sommelier will pour a small amount of wine for the person that ordered the wine. The recipient should gently swirl the wine in the glass to release the aroma, give it a sniff, and then taste it. If there is an objectionable or unexpected aroma, the sommelier should recommend further aerating the wine in which case the “off odor” will dissipate, or replacing the bottle if called for. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between funky aromas that are inherent in certain wines and similar smells that are symptoms of a defect. Proper wine etiquette is to consult with the sommelier. A “corked” wine has been tainted by a moldy cork if you smell an aroma reminiscent of a “wet basement”. Unfortunately, the mold is not visible nor does the cork necessarily smell moldy. Since there are varying levels of cork taint, a corked wine can be overtly stinky or the fruit character is slightly muted; send the bottle back immediately If you perceive this to be the situation. If you’re not quite sure, in keeping with proper wine etiquette, politely ask the sommelier for an opinion.
Decanting
There are two reasons to decant a wine: (1) to separate the wine from the sediment in the case of a 20 year-old port or red wine; or (2) decanting and swirling the wine in the glass will do a far better job than opening the wine two hours prior and letting the wine “breathe,” which is not practical in most restaurant settings. White and sparkling wines rarely need extra breathing time. It is not proper etiquette or an acceptable practice to return a wine simply because you do not like it as much as you thought you might. The proper etiquette is to nod, say “thank you,” “it’s fine” or some signal for the sommelier to begin pouring after you have taken a sip. To allow enough space to swirl the wine, wine etiquette dictates that the glass is filled about one third full. Sparkling wines should be poured against or along the side of the glass to preserve the bubbles.
Wine etiquette may seem unnecessary, but following proper wine etiquette enhances the total wine drinking experience. Wine etiquette and all its subtleties are intended to slow the experience so the wine can be fully enjoyed and appreciated.
By Kenneth J. McCormick
Webmaster of About Facts Net
There are a lot of counterfeit items in this world. Just to mention a few, there is counterfeit money, counterfeit credit cards, counterfeit identities and from what I have been hearing lately about some of the Chinese cars, there may be some counterfeit cars also. When one tends to think of counterfeit items, I really don’t think they give much thought to counterfeit wine. I know that I certainly don’t give wine much of a thought, but on the other hand I am not a wine drinker so I can’t speak for them. I was very surprised to learn that there are quite a few bottles of counterfeit wine on the market. I really shouldn’t have been, because some of the really old bottles are worth quite a bit of money and when money is involved so is crime. I have to wonder though, if somebody plops down a couple of thousand dollars for a rare wine and he and his friends drink it, if most people ever really know the difference? I just have to wonder how many people have done this? The reason that I told you that I don’t drink wine is that I don’t want you to think that this article is being written from the point of view of a wine expert, since I am anything but. I just wanted to clear that point up.
I was reading about wines the other day without really knowing why? In the article it talked about counterfeit wines and called them Château Faux. For some reason I felt that this was kind of intriguing. We all know about the big problems with Chinese imports that we have been experiencing, but how many people know that counterfeiting wine is also a big industry in China? Some of the wine bottles from as recently as 20 years ago are no longer manufactured the same way. In order to counterfeit some of these wines from that time, most counterfeiters would have to refill an original bottle. Here is the thing however, the bottle has to be perfect and the labels also have to be in order. One might not know that this was a counterfeit product even if he was an expert, until the cork was pulled. Most of the time, I have been told, that you can tell by the cork, if you know what you’re looking for, if a bottle has been refilled. Here is something that I just learned, the corks in wine bottles may have a vintage burned into their side. I don’t know if this exists on the older brands, but I do know it does exists on some. One dead giveaway is when you pull the cork on an expensive bottle of wine and this area has been smoothed out, if this brand usually had it burned into the cork. So here is the way that works, this type of wine would have the name and the vintage on the cork. .The particular bottle of wine I am talking about was said to have been purchased for $2000.
Just like US currency, some of the makers of very expensive wine are using high-tech labels and engraving, hoping that this will make counterfeiting their product, much more difficult. This doesn’t hold true if somebody gets a hold of an empty bottle. There are some people out there that collect rare wines. Can you imagine how many of them think that they have the genuine articles stored in their wine cellar, when they really only have a counterfeit? About the only saving grace in wine counterfeiting is that the people that usually buy these expensive bottles of wine can afford the loss. This does not make the crime any less serious however. I have always said a crime is a crime is a crime. It doesn’t lessen the crime just because you’re taking advantage of the richer segment of our society. The counterfeiting of wine has become so widespread in the United States, that the FBI is now involved in it. Some feel that some of the biggest wine auction houses in the world are turning a blind eye to the question of whether bottles are authentic, or they are not. Perhaps this is because nobody wants to have to pull the cork to answer that question, they feel they would destroy the value of the wine. The truth is that even if you opened a bottle or two from a large consignment of wines to be auctioned, this certainly does not guarantee that the rest of the wine is authentic. This is truly a huge problem for wine connoisseurs and collectors. When wine collections are auctioned from completely honest people, that doesn’t mean that they unknowingly don’t have counterfeits in their collections.
So how much wine is sold at auction houses? Well, The Independent, states that last year Christie’s is said to have sold about $58 million worth of rare wine from London and Paris to New York and Los Angeles. That’s an awful lot of wine just from one auction house. It has been said that there is some kind of deal between the Italian Mafia and Chinese manufacturers of fraudulent wines. This problem is so bad that it is believed that some of the very old wines may have been forged many years ago and went undetected. I can see it all now, some multi-rich executive is hosting a dinner party and pops open a bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild, which he paid thousands of dollars for and all his guests drink it and praise the flavor, but in truth it is a forgery and nobody has even noticed. I really don’t know, but I do suspect that it just might be possible for a wine to be imitated in a lab. They may not get it exactly right, but it just might be close enough to fool many people. After all, if you gave a bottle of this stuff to somebody who had never tasted it, how would they know it was a forgery. So it seems to me that you would have had to have tasted the real thing at least once, before you could judge the next bottle.
When we talk about wine counterfeiting in China, we are not saying that the Chinese government condones this practice. As a matter of fact, they are actively cracking down on wine counterfeiters. The problem in China is that there are actually whole factories there dedicated to this. So these are not small operations, they are more like wholesale wine counterfeiting operations. As I said above, many of these factories have ties to organized crime and are working hand-in-hand with the Mafia in Italy, the Australian mob and many other gangster organizations. I guess one of the real big problems will happen when they have perfected counterfeit wines to the point where you wouldn’t be able to tell the counterfeit from the real without a lab analysis. In this technological world of ours this cannot be viewed as an impossibility. Looking at the art community for example, it is now possible for a computer-controlled machine to make an exact copy of an original painting so perfect that a law has been passed that states that it must say on the painting that is a reproduction. It may just turn out that the same thing will happen in the wine market in years to come. In a way, while this might be a bad thing for wine collectors and wine aficionados, it might turn out to be the beginning of a good thing for the rest of us. What I am talking about here is food that can be manufactured without using real animals and yet be so close in taste that we would not know the difference.
We know that much of the foreign wine that is being sold in Beijing is not genuine.This is mostly a problem for the Chinese however. Europe has also been accused of high-end wine counterfeiting. Many believe that this is actually where wine counterfeiting began and that it is only recently that an Asian market has developed for it. You want to impress your boss so you got him a bottle of wine that cost a few hundred dollars. Later you begin to think about your purchase. You start to worry that the bottle may not contain the genuine product and that maybe you boss, who’s coming to dinner at your house with his wife, has tasted the genuine article and will know the difference. What should you do? Should you take the chance and put this wine out on the table, or should you get something a little less exotic, that has less of a chance of not being genuine? This may be the choice that faces all wine drinkers in the future. It is nice to think that you have something rare, but it is not so nice when you have to worry about its authenticity. Well I have people coming over tomorrow. I guess I’ll go out and get myself a box of wine, nothing is too good for my guests and I know for a fact that it is genuine Gallo.
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