I often wonder why wine isn't more popular with the geek crowd. It combines alcohol, science and obsessive collecting of overpriced items, all popular geek activities.
My best guess is that it's the lack of gadgetry. There are about 300 different types of bottle openers, sure, but your standard mechanical corkscrew with arms works just fine and you can do a little puppet show with it, to boot.
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We need a little flash, a little boom, maybe a touch of beep. Here are my suggestions for the sort of wine gadgetry that will make merlot as geekish as homemade Mary Jane Watson porn.
The first thing you do with a glass of wine is swirl it. I'm led to understand that there are sound gastronomic reasons for this, but mostly it just gives you a chance to lift your glass and wordlessly say, "I AM GOING TO DRINK SOME WINE NOW."
Each variety (or, in wine jargon, "varietal") of wine has an optimal rate of rotation, or it will as soon as I make up a little chart. This glass, then, is set on a rotating stem, and buttons on the base allow you to swirl your wine appropriately with but a touch. Also, the whirring is soothing.
Apparently, the amazing thing about wine is that it doesn't taste like wine. As soon as you taste it, you're supposed to announce that it contains the flavors of red fruit, black fruit, off-white fruit, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, pistachio, Wavy Gravy, leather, moss, pleated slacks, tamarind, tamarin, snozzberry and the quiet yearning for the open road in the heart of every American.
Suffice to say, some of these are kind of tough to pick out. This clever little gadget can be installed in a molar. Once there, the tooth-mounted flavor sensor quickly breaks down and analyzes even the smallest drop of wine for aldehydes, esters and tannins, relaying the information it's found to a discreet speaker in your ear. At last, you can with full confidence declare a glass of wine to have "a wispy touch of pear and loquat, blended masterfully with a strong chord of pepper and cinnamon, all held together by COMPOUND NOT IDENTIFIED – PLEASE CHECK FOR DRIVER UPDATES."
The main problem with aging your wine is that you have to age at the same time. You buy a nice bottle of wine that will truly come into its prime in 10 years, and when you open it 10 years later you can't enjoy the wine because you're thinking, "The hell? Has it really been 10 years? Man, that's depressing. If only I had some alcohol."
So that's good, I guess, but you're not really appreciating the flavor – you're just drowning your sorrows. You could always buy a bottle of very old wine instead of aging it, but at those prices you may as well just buy a jar of pure orgasm essence; it's cheaper. This temporal acceleration device comes in two models. The pricier one suspends the wine in a field of accelerated temporality, aging it 10 years in a matter of minutes. The cheaper one just writes a different year on the label.
The second- or third-most fun thing about champagne – or sparkling wine, if you're going to let the French tell you what to call things – is popping the cork. But if you pay close attention, you'll notice that you don't actually get any points, achievements or unlockables for doing so. (Although, in all fairness, you do get champagne.)
The first-person champagne shooter comes with a case of champagne, each bottle outfitted with a motion-sensitive cork, and a device you can plug into your TV to play a little game. Alien zombie orcs are invading the Earth, and their only weaknesses are cork and challenges involving alcohol. Blast their ships by popping the champagne, then challenge them to a drinking game! We are not responsible for the inevitable damage you will do to your television, your liver and your life.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become an oenophile, an oneiromancer and an ontologist.
