shape of bottles?

[Randy Caparoso]

Oh, I was just kidding, folks. I never drink from containers... unless no one's looking (a guy thing). The problem with commercial home refrigerators, of course, is they usually only give you one slot for a bottle of wine. We typically have three, four, up to a dozen bottles open at a time! So they go everywhere -- on the leftover spaghetti, in the fruit and vegetable bins, etc.

Insofar as opening, there's good and bad about the big lipped bottles. The bad is that cheap ones will indeed crack under pressure from a lousy corkscrew. If that happens more than once to you, I strongly suggest that you get a new, better corkscrew -- one with an extra long spiral and wider slot on the lever so that you can extract with gentler, easier pressure. If not available in a local store, the wine catalogues advertised in the popular wine magazines always have a large selection. Of course, the best corkscrew in the world won't help if you can't place your spiral right down the middle!

The good is that these new fangled bottles are definitely more drip free -- a big plus if you're often serving reds on white tablecloths. In the restaurant, of course, I expect my people to know how to open a bottle. So the big lipped bottles are very much appreciated by those of us in the bizz-ness.

As for the prairie, Nancy, I think we need a goatskin!

[This message has been edited by Randy Caparoso (edited 12-04-1999).]