Roseyland

One of the hardest parts of writing this blog is the guilt that comes from knowing how jealous it must make others of my life. I’m constantly torn between wanting to share the exciting activities of my day to day existance, and yet not wanting to make everyone realize how boring their lives are in comparison. Today, I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and let you in on one of my recent endeavors. You might want to sit down for this. Ready? Okay here we go. Recently, I had the opportunity to try the Target Wine Cube. I was fortunate enough receive this opportunity when I visited my local Target and purchased a Target Wine Cube. In case you haven’t guessed, the red box in the picture above is the Target Wine Cube. It’s a cube shaped box filled with wine.

I’ve been trying to drink more wine lately for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that red wine has numerous health benefits, or at least the news keeps saying so. I also love buying bottles of wine. If you are ever bored, and you live in the St. Louis area, you should go to Provisions Market and browse the massive selection of wine. I don’t know why, but bottles of wine just look so cool to me. I also like holding them and running my fingers over the labels, but let’s not go there. Other good places to browse wine include, World Market, Whole Foods, and St. Louis Cellars.

When I first started drinking wine, I liked dryer white wines. Sweet wines are good, but I can only have a few sips before the sweetness gets to be too much. Dry white wines are nice because they are not overly sweet, but they still taste like they have a little sweetness in the background, which I found preferable to the bone dry nature of most red wines I had tried. I have grown to like red wines though, and now I pretty much drink red wines exclusively.

The best glass of wine I have ever had was at Les Chefs de France in Epcot. It was a 2003 Bordeaux from Chateau Haut Mondain. You can’t really find this wine in the U.S. (other than Epcot), I’ve looked. The first thing I thought when I tasted this wine was that it was like drinking air. Which doesn’t sound that great, but what I was trying to say is that it was smooth. So smooth. Usually when there is a liquid in your mouth, you know it’s there. There is a boundary of separation between your mouth and the liquid, because they are two different things. With this wine though, it felt like it was a part of my mouth, and when I swallowed, it went down easily, almost too easily. I also bought another Bordeaux when I was in London, and it was almost as good as the Epcot wine. It has the same smoothness to it. I think the technical wine term would be “silky smooth tannins”. What I don’t know though, is if this silky smooth quality is a feature of Bordeaux wines or of the age of the wine. The Epcot and London wines were both Bordeauxs, but they were also aged longer than the wines I usually drink. Hmm…

I seem to have gotten a little off track. Here is a picture of the Target Wine Cube in my wine cooler. Did I mention I have a wine cooler? I got it because I found out that the drinking temperature for most red wines is between 60 and 65 degrees fahrenheit. Before the wine cooler, I had been drinking red wine straight out of the refrigerator at 34 degrees. Oh the travesty!

So what’s the big deal about the wine cube? The recommend amount of red wine to drink for the health benefits is 4 to 8 ounces a day. This means it will take one person 3 to 6 days to finish a bottle of wine, but wine starts to oxidize the second you open the bottle. A little Google research suggest that you probably don’t want to drink a bottle of wine more than 3 or 4 days after it has been opened. For me this is a problem, because once I open a bottle of wine, I feel this pressure to finish it before it goes bad, but I also don’t want to exceed the recommended amount of wine per day. Yes, I really am this anal.

Fortunately, for people like me, Target invented the Wine Cube. Or more accurately, one day, somebody invented boxed wine. Boxed wine has bad rap here in the U.S., but according to the internets, boxed wine is very popular in Europe and Australia. The benefit of boxed wine is that the wine is stored in a plastic bag. When wine is “poured” from the bag, the bag collapses rather than let air in that would oxidize the wine. This lets wine stay fresh for 4 weeks once the cube is first opened. No more pressure to finish off the bottle before it goes bad. Hurray!

Here is the wine cube wine in a glass next to a candle. The candle is there because the wine glass looked lonely by itself. Don’t you love my stemless wine glass? It’s so sexy and fun to hold. It’s also less likely to be knocked over by a cat. You can get your own at Crate & Barrel.

The wine was good. Nothing amazing, but as good as most of the wine I usually drink. I’m not a wine expert, but it probably had hints of some type of berry and oak notes, or something like that. I love the idea of boxed wine, but it does take the fun away from browsing bottles of wine. Still it is nice to be able to have a glass of wine without having to deal with the hassle of opening a bottle. I think the Wine Cube could make a nice complement to the wine drinking experience. The Wine Cube is nice for casual day to day drinking, and then bottles can be used for more special occasions. Then again, what the hell do I know? Salut!