My new favorite thing is wine with screw tops. No, these aren’t Thunderbird or Boone’s Farm but honest-to-goodness California wines that are aged and everything. The process for bottling wine has advanced and corking really isn’t necessary anymore. Many wineries have abandoned cork anyway because of the price and are using synthetic variations. But I like the screw tops. They are easy to open and easy to store if I don’t happen to finish the bottle.
When I mentioned my admiration for these wines to my oenophile friends, they looked askance at the very idea. They are cork snobs. Not that I can blame them, think of a screw top and images of Ripple come to mind. But the world changes and that which we poo-poo’d before becomes something we like. What bothers me is that these wine drinkers aren’t going to give these vintages a chance because of their belief that only one way of bottling a wine is acceptable.
I fine we tend to be that way about reading. Romance readers quite often categorize themselves as “historical readers” or “category readers” or “paranormal readers” and rarely leave their chosen genre. By limiting ourselves to only one genre, we are missing out on a great deal of wonderful fiction. Even staying in the romance genre and never straying tends to make us stale. I’ve been trying to broaden my reading horizons and try authors and sub-genres I never had much interest in. It’s a difficult thing. No one wants to waste time and money on a book they are unfamiliar with, but the gems are out there. Sometimes we need to take a chance. Yeah, you may run into the literary equivalent of cooking wine, but it will be worth it if you find a Dom Perignon.
