One of my favorite reds for the last year has been El Arte de Vivir, a gorgeous, smooth Ribera del Duero with blood orange, Ranier cherry and dark chocolate notes that just hit the spot every time for a fantastic price. I'd been looking forward to this bottle (a 2008) for a few weeks now, but I was having troubling finding a good time to open it.
Well, I got my chance tonight. I rinsed a wine glass, fished my corkscrew out of a drawer of kitchen utensils, and dug it into the cork. All very status quo.
Well, it was all going normally until I began to pull the cork out. It broke in half, and the remaining half was buried deep inside the neck. I gave the corkscrew another shot, and came up with nothing more than a few splinters.
Now, my home corkscrew is the kind that Dave loathes, the kind with the wings that fly up as you turn the screw in, so it's reach was too short to get to the last bit of cork stuck deep, deep in the bottle neck. I searched my drawer for the little skinny kind that would allow me to reach in deep, but then I remembered that corkscrew actually lives in my desk at work.
Shit.
So I did the only thing I could think of: I pushed it in with a steak knife.
If you've been around wine for a long time, you can probably guess what happened next. This beautiful Spanish red erupted like a volcano, leaving both me and my white kitchen cabinets soaked.
I ran to the bathroom to wipe it off my face, and when I caught a glimpse of my wine-soaked face in the mirror, there was nothing to do but laugh!
So I probably lost some juice to the explosion, a little more when the bottle fell over onto the stove top, and it has the mutilated remains of a bad cork floating in it, but my face and the kitchen both have been wiped down and the wine tastes none the worse for all the drama.
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