“Don’t let a little thing like a recession come between you and your pinot!” – Me.

I don’t buy the idea that wine lovers – real wine lovers – are going to “trade down” during the current economic downturn and buy cheap wine, or worse, no wine at all. I think many of you are like me: I’d rather slash spending in other areas so that I can continue to enjoy the wines I like.

So, in an attempt to help you do just that, here are 3.5 relatively simple ways you can save yourself some cash. Cash that you can then redirect, judo-style, toward sating your wine lust.

Tip #1. Re-evaluate your cell phone plan.

I’ve been on a 900 anytime minute plan with AT&T for the past 9 months. When I got my iPhone I was sure I’d need every one of them, but I did stick a note in my calendar to check my usage patterns after 6 months just in case. Well the 6 month mark came and went, but I finally got around to it this week.

AT&T doesn’t make it easy to glean the info you need to make an informed decision. They show your total minutes in their billing summaries, not your total anytime minutes, which is what you pay for. I’m sure the same can be said for Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile. So be sure you find the line that shows your total anytime minutes used for the past 6 months or so, and write them down or enter them into a spreadsheet.

Being a data geek, I made a chart.

Basically I found that I could save myself $20 a month on my calling plan with virtually no fear that I would incur any overage fees. After pressure from Congress, AT&T followed Verizon’s lead last October and stopped requiring that you extend your contract when you change your rate plan. This means you won’t be penalized for switching to a lower priced plan. Take full advantage.

Three months worth of savings will net me a top-of-the-line, absolutely stellar Russian River Pinot like Lynmar’s ’05 Quail Hill. You might do even better.

Tip #1.5: If you are an AT&T customer you can save another $2.95/month by opting out of the Roadside Assistance program. Totally superfluous if you already have AAA.

Total Monthly Savings: $22.95.
Bottom line: Worth a look.

Tip #2. Report Your Credit Card Lost or Stolen

This one is a little tricky. Depending on your credit card company, it may even be more trouble than it’s worth. But when we recently were forced to replace one of our credit cards I was deluged with emails and letters about automatic payments that weren’t going through…many of which I had completely forgotten about! This allowed me to pick and choose which services to let expire and which ones to keep. I figure I saved around $40 a month canceling autopays for services I no longer use.

The caveat here is that some credit card companies will allow autopayments to continue to be charged to your account even if you cancel a credit card! Be sure to ask the customer service rep about their policies before you make the switch.

Hey, and while you’re on the phone, ask your credit card company to lower your interest rate. I think you’ll be happily surprised with the results.

UPDATE #1: Here’s some insider’s advice for how to ask for the rate reduction:

This script works better. Call and tell them that you have X number of cards and you are going to pay off all of them but one. Obviously you are going to keep and use whichever one offers you the lowest interest rate. If they tell you no, tell them you are thinking about cancelling and would like to speak to retention. If retention, who’s job is to keep you from closing, or saving, your account then there is nothing to be done. If you can afford to pay it off, do so. Don’t close your account…

We continuously get people calling in saying “I pay my card on time in full every month, I deserve blah blah blah”. Guess what pal, you are the worst type of cardholder to a credit card company. We make no money off of you. We want someone who carries a balance and pays interest every month. You’d be surprised how fast credit card companies will call your bluff and close your account if you are one of the on time and in full types.

Total Monthly Savings: $40.
Bottom line: Terrific way to put an end to rougue autopays that eat away at your disposable income, provided your credit card company isn’t ethically challenged.

Tip #3. Be Smart About HDTV Accessories

I have a friend who already has his “economic stimulus” check spent. He’s going to be getting himself an HDTV. By most accounts, HDTVs have come down in price about as far as they are going to for the foreseeable future, so it’s a pretty good time to buy.

It is not however, and nor will it ever be, a good time to blow 80 bucks on a High Definition (HDMI) cable at Best Buy. Independent tests show that these outrageously overpriced cables ($50-80!) are the exact same quality as those that you can buy for $10 or less online at Monoprice.com and Amazon.

Instead spend that money where a higher price actually gets you higher quality. Like on the wonderful Moshin ’05 Family Reserve (scroll down to locate it) for instance.

Total Savings: $40-70.
Bottom line: A no brainer if you are in the market for a HDTV or HDMI component.

Let me know about any money saving tips you’ve found success with in the comments. I’ve got more wine to buy!

And if you find these tips useful and feel like thanking us, I’d be mighty obliged if you were to join our inaugural vintage mailing list. It’s free!

UPDATE #2

In the comments Dave recommends checking your Satellite/Cable bill and your phone bill. Movie Rental services like Netflix might save you some cash vs. HBO and Showtime, and eliminating your landline and going completely mobile might be an option to save cash as well.

Thanks Dave! And keep the tips coming!

Photojojo has a kinda cool tip for turning your wine glasses into creative picture frames up on their blog.

This could be an interesting project to undertake for a party where you somehow had a picture of every attendee available – and had the patience to make these ahead of time. If done right though I think the results could be remarkable, especially at a winery event.

There are a few drawbacks though. They include:

• Not being able to wash your glasses without melting your pictures.
• You can’t see through Pinot (or any red wine for that matter), which drops the coolness factor precipitously.
• You have to look at your own wildly distorted visage while you drink. For me at least, this is a real deal breaker. I look goofy enough without throwing in the funhouse mirror effect. That’s just piling on.

Still, if you’re the Martha Stewart type and are feeling crafty, the tutorial and all the gritty details are here.

If you love wine you’ve probably at least glanced at the fancy wine journals you can buy from the likes of Wine Enthusiast and elsewhere. They let you scrawl a few tasting notes and scrapbook labels into a central repository that you can file away and look up the next time you want to know what you thought of a particular wine.

Much of this functionality is now replicated with a bunch of the new wine sites online, but for me there is something very attractive about having a tangible thing in my hand. Ephemera, a physical token of an experience – whatever you want to call it – just appeals to me.

The thing is every journal I’ve ever seen has been so unbelievably overpriced and downright fugly that I just never bothered. I don’t want some overly-serious leather bound tome with flowery script on the cover – or worse – some lame still life of a wine bottle or a vine peering back at me every time I decide to do a little scribbling. Yet at the same time a plain old spiral bound notebook didn’t seem to fit the bill either. I’m a Mac user after all, and I want my tools to be beautiful as well as practical.

Enter the Moleskine. Pronounced either Mole-skin, Mole-skeen, or Mol-uh-skeen-uh, the little black notebooks were the Macbooks of the early 20th century. Originally available only from Parisian stationery shops, Hemingway used them to write the rough draft of the Sun Also Rises while dining at various cafes around the city. Van Gogh used them to doodle and sketch what later became “Sunflowers”, and Picasso and Matisse dabbled with them as well.

And now you can use one as your wine journal since they fit the bill perfectly. The best model I’ve found for wine journaling is the Large Sketchbook. It’s 5 1/4″ by 8 1/4″, with 100 blank archival quality pages and a killer little page-sized folder in the very back to hold wine label removers. It comes with a cloth bookmark and convenient band that wraps around the opening to secure any loose items you might keep in it as well. Plus it just looks cool.

Best of all Moleskines are pretty cheap, especially when you consider that they have a HUGE aesthetic advantage over every other wine journal out there. They generally run 15 bucks per, with small discounts for larger orders online. You can also run down to Barnes and Noble and grab one there.

But if you are a serious journaler and want to buy in bulk, where you can save some really major cash is on wine label removers. Without exception, all retail wine label removers are insanely – ludicrously – overpriced for what they are – basically some mylar and a bit of stickum. You can buy a box of of the 4×6 ScotchPads, which normally sell for as much as $23 per 25 sheets, at R.S. Hughes for only $56 plus shipping for 1000 sheets. That’s a buck eighty (with shipping included) for 25 sheets, a savings of something like one million percent. Score!

Put it all together and you’ve got a first class wine journal for cheap. Let me know in the comments if you give it a try. We might offer them in our tasting room at some point, and the feedback would be really valuable.

Finally a quick tip: don’t just write about what the wine tasted like, which can get mind numbingly stale. Instead write about the circumstances that surrounded you drinking it. It’ll make going back through and reading about the juice you’ve tasted much more enjoyable.

The fine folks over at the Trellis Alliance have released a new series of lectures from the June Grapevine Clean Plant Workshop. They are using a Macromedia product called Breeze that allows you to view the slide, the lecturer and to hear the audio all on the same page. It is very cool tech and makes viewing the lectures almost as good as being there.

The most accessible presentation for a general audience is the talk on Ampelography by Andy Walker. In it he talks about how scientists as well as nurserymen and women go about identifying cultivars (vine varieties) and also gives an overview of the “microsatellite” or DNA identification methods now in use to do the same.

Interestingly, the learned folk at Davis are still unable to genetically identify clonal variations among a variety. Currently DNA is only useful for identifying varieties in the broadest sense. For example, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Gris, since they are all the same variety, will be indistinguishable from each other using the current techniques. DNA chains are complex and the identifying markers are so randomly distributed that DNA ID becomes impractical.

You can check out the presentation yourself here. Dr. Walker has a winning style and is a pleasure to watch, but you need to be a pretty uber wine geek to sit through much past the first half. Still it is nice to know that the information is out there for the taking – and free! – if you want it.

Supertaster. Super. Taster. It just sounds good. Blue tights and red cape good. Who wouldn’t want to be a wine supertaster?

According to Yale PhD Linda Bartoshuk, about 25% of the population are supertasters (15% male, 35% female), and those that are owe their supertaster status to a genetic lottery. We’re either born with a tongue crammed with fungiform papillae, mushroom looking blisters which house bunches of taste buds on our tongues, or we’re not. A similar amount, about a quarter of the population, are non-tasters. The rest are normal tasters.

Super tasters usually show their superness by being extremely sensitive to bitter and spicy flavors. Non tasters will show no aversion at all to bitter tastes that super tasters will gag on, and normal tasters fall somewhere in between.

How this applies to wine specifically is anyone’s guess. Does being a genetically endowed super taster make you a better wine consumer? Does being one make you a better or more reliable wine reviewer? Perhaps, but some argue that being a super taster can actually harm your ability to appreciate wine.

Whatever the case, if you’re wondering if you were one of those born a supertaster or not, you can find out (probably) by following these simple steps.

1. Take a cotton ball dipped in blue food coloring and and spread it all over the tip of your tongue. Swirl the coloring around and then spit and rinse. Dry your tongue as best you can.

2. Take a peice of paper with a .5 inch hole punched in it and press it up against the tip of your tongue.

3. Grab a camera with a macro feature and have someone take a close up shot of the exposed portion of your tongue. Most literature on this technique instructs to use a magnifying glass to count the fungiform papillae while you hold your mouth open, but that seems a little weird to me. I recommend a photo.

4. Count up the number of large, round, pinkish blister looking things that you can see in the sample space provided by the .5 inch hole.

If you count fewer than 15 papillae you are a non-taster. If you have from 15 to 35 papillae you are a normal taster. If you have over 35 papillae, go get your tongue a cape, because you’re a super taster baby!

If you have trouble determining what to count as a fungiform papillae, you’re not alone. In the picture to the left of my tongue I’ve highlighted what I think are qualifying papillae and those smaller ones which may or may not be. Good luck!

Links:
Jamie Goode’s excellent article on the subject
A Skeptic: Do Taste Buds Make the Critic?
Yale Medicine: An Education in Taste

The short answer:

Use equal parts hydrogen peroxide and Dawn liquid soap as soon as possible after the spill.

UPDATE: El Jefe from El Bloggo Torcido adds in the comments that Wine Away has worked for him and his wife, and that they like it so much they offer it in their tasting room. Wine Away is made from “fruit and vegetable extracts” which sounds mysterious, but apparently it works great.

The longer answer:

In 2002 Dr. Andrew Waterhouse and a high school student intern at UC Davis performed a series of tests to determine what solutions were the best at getting red wine out of a series of fabrics. The fabrics tested were: silk, cotton, a polyester-cotton blend, and nylon. They applied the solutions at two different intervals. The first was two minutes after the spill and the second a whopping 24 hours after. The fabrics were treated and then left to stand for three hours. After that they were washed in cold water and dried.

The bottom line of the research was what you probably already know if you’ve ever spilled red wine: most of the cleaner solutions are pretty horrible at getting out the stain. In fact they were just about as effective as simply chucking the garment in the wash with regular old detergent and praying.

One cleaner did stand out though. The best cleaner they found was an even mixture of peroxide, which bleaches the dyes in red wine, and some Dawn liquid soap. The runner up was a stain remover called Erado-sol, which was almost as effective on the cotton based materials, and was the most effective in cleaning the silk.

Wives tales about using white whine to treat red wine stains were a dead end in everything but nylon. On everything else white wine was about as good as regular old laundering, and in some cases it actually made the stain worse. The same with true with salt, so go ahead and save your sodium chloride for the dinner table.

Instead, pull out that old jar of peroxide and some Dawn and scrub out those pesky red wine stains for good.