Drink Wine Day

What the day is

Drink Wine Day is observed on February 18. There is no theme, no required varietal and no ceremony attached. Open something, preferably with food and other people.

Wine attracts more performance than almost any other drink, which is a shame, because the useful knowledge is small and the rest is preference.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, and no founder or sponsoring organization is reliably known.

The drink itself is among the oldest manufactured goods on earth, with archaeological evidence of winemaking going back thousands of years across the Caucasus and the Near East. Almost everything that followed is refinement of the same process: crush the fruit, let yeast convert sugar to alcohol, and decide when to stop.

The structural elements are worth knowing because they explain why a wine tastes as it does. Acid makes a wine feel fresh and makes your mouth water. Tannin, drawn from skins, seeds and oak, is the drying grip on the gums, and it is what lets a red stand up to fatty food. Alcohol carries sweetness and weight. Residual sugar is what remains unfermented. Almost every judgment about a bottle is some combination of those four.

One persistent myth deserves correction: sulfites are not the usual cause of red wine headaches. Sulfites occur naturally in fermentation and are present in dried fruit at far higher levels, and genuine sulfite sensitivity is rare and typically shows as an asthmatic response rather than a headache.

How to take part

• Fix the temperature. Most reds are served too warm and most whites too cold; twenty minutes in the refrigerator and twenty minutes out of it respectively will improve nearly any bottle.
• Use a bigger glass and fill it less. Room in the glass is what lets the wine smell of anything.
• Buy one bottle outside your habit. Ask a shop what they are excited about at your price.
• Drink it with food. Wine is built for the table and tastes different there.
• Keep an opened bottle stoppered in the refrigerator, reds included. It will hold two or three days.