Lore Sjöberg, who often writes humorous pieces for Wired, has put his satirical pen to paper and pondered the wine gadgets missing from the world. An automatic wine twirler? A tooth-mounted flavor sensor? A temporal acceleration device to age your wine? (He’s obviously unaware of the devices that purport to do this.)
How about his idea for a first-person Champagne shooter? I could combine my love of video games with my love of wine, though I’m not a big FPS fan.
I can’t help but point out that his use of the word “varietal” — to my mind, a misuse — illustrates my belief that we shouldn’t use the word except in its very specific meaning of a bottle marketed as being made from a single grape variety. Why use jargon incorrectly when there’s a perfectly good non-jargon term? That’s part of why culture views wine geeks as objects of derision.
