Red or White?

Unfortunately, the bolder the red, the more highly extracted the flavors and aromas, the more likely it is to turn you purple. California Zinfandels and Aussie shirazes are especially notorious, but incredibly good. Lighter Bordeaux style wines (cab sauv/merlot/cab franc blends) and pinot noirs aren't so bad for it, but they are too subtle to stand well on their own generally and need to accompany food.

Okay, so that's a really good idea and I feel dumb for not thinking of it. Once you open a bottle of red, put a cork back in it, can it sit for months before you use it? Or, is the shelf life only a week or so?

If you don't like the wine because it smells funny (like musty gym socks or ammonia) or tastes rotten, for heavens sake, don't cook with it. It's possibly corked (if it has a natural cork, not a screw top or plastic cork) or adulterated in some way. Those odors/tastes don't "cook out" of it.

You can also trick out a thin, sourish wine with some fruit juice, sugar, and club soda, like a sangria spritzer or wine punch. Not bad for summer sipping.

Still, my single favourite wine is an Argentinian Etchart. But in the main I adopt a get-it-down-you anti-rockist approach to wine drinking.

DV, that's a good wine that, we get it whenever we go to Calais

The reds just please me more. It's not that I don't know whites can be pleasing, but it's a different aesthetic: light, crisp, pipi du chat and all that.

I prefer the coffee, tobacco, vanilla, and smoky notes of a heavy red, like an aged zin, cab, or merlot. I like lighter reds (Beaujolais etc) if they are paired with foods that like them.

Have you ever had a methode champenoise red? I've had two very different ones, both Australian: a sparkling chambourcin from the Hunter valley - fruity and fizzy with a nice mousse and cheerful nose, and a shiraz from Peter Lehmann called The Black Queen - chocolate, licorice, an incredible long finish, really delightful. These are not your pink champagne sort of things.

Lately we've been trying lots of different blends of reds and are particularly fond of Big Red Truck from Cline. It's gone well with everything from roast pork to beef stroganoff.

Wine wine wine spo-dee-o-dee, pass that bottle to me!

One of the worst wine things I ever did was wait too long to open a particularly special bottle. When I finally deemed an occasion worthy, it was ruined - the cork had shrunk up and the wine leaked and evaporated and oxidized and rotted (all from very bad storage practices).

We had it with hamburgers and it was excellent.

On opening, I noticed the cork had leaked a bit on the downside, but the wine wasn't oxidized a bit. The slightest hint of raisin, but otherwise nice solid fruit and still firm tannins. Really lovely, velvety and smooth.

The bottle of Black Queen mentioned upthread is still in the cellar, waiting.

We've been a bit red heavy, but seem to have been drinking lots of white! I bought some rieslings for the first time in a decade before christmas, I'd forgotten how sweet they could be! We've got shedloads of gusty australian reds in the 'cellar'