Hello, Just came back from town - ouple of errands to run in Malmo, then off to Copenhagen for a v short tasting of Dom Perignon 1999 (turned out nice again). SOrt of a point tasting - I mean, a horizontal crosses a vertical (one vintage, one brand), gotta be a point, right? Anyway. When we returned from Oz in Septembner, we brought along a number of bottles - many of them with stelvin. Most of them, I think. Don't keep tabs (yet) but I think that 7 out of 6 were under stelvin. Excepting the Verdelho from Ernest Hill, which we drank last week, most of these bottles are still down in our cellar and will remain there for at least e few years.
TOday, I went into the Systembolaget in Malmo, bought two bottles of Gobelsburg Riesling 2006 from Austria (Kamptal) - also under stelvin. One for early drinking (tonight, even), and one to keep.
In COpenhagen, after sipping my Dompa (which is what the affluent caste calls Dom Perignon in Sweden), I selected 7 bottles from Mantelassi (mostly for keeping a year or so), and two bottles from Tasmania - Pinot Noir and Gris respectively. These, too, were under stelvin.
Carrying my haul into my increasingly crowded cellar, I realised that the nice racks I bought a few months back are not suited for stelvins - they are supposed to stand up, right?
So, all of a sudden, not only is my cellar crowded, it is also supposed to hold bottles oriented in another position (hence the clever pun in the title).
Know what? The bottles standing up don't look as nice and orderly as the ones lying down. They, in fact, look a lot like old liquor bottles of which we have drunk once or twice and which now stand looking forlorn on a shelf in the cellar.
SO tell me, gentlemen and ladies all, how many stelvin bottles do YU have in your cellar? And are they pleasing to your eye? I make my count 14, at the moment. And, no, they are not.
Cheers
Nils