Mrs. Peacock, In the Freezer, With a Corkscrew

As noted in the below report on Art of the Table, my new wine friend is the lightly bubbly Portuguese white wine Vinho Verde.

There was a relatively inexpensive bottle on display at Metro Market when I ambled over for my coffee and paper (like a grown up!) on Sunday morning. I picked it up, and mid-afternoon, stuck it in the freezer to get nice and chilly for dinner. (Despite now living in the Pacific Northwest, and despite the fact that Fall has made itself soggily present over the past week or so, I still can't resist the Southwestern urge to drink icy and refreshing beverages during all seasons.)

I don't know what it says about me that I got so caught up in happily washing out the interior of my refrigerator while listening to dire podcasts about the economy that I totally forgot about the bottle of wine in the freezer.  Whatever it says, it's the truth, because I did.

By the time I'd finished with the fridge and was ready to move on to cleaning out the freezer, the wine had frozen, the contents had of course expanded, forcing out the cork.

Luckily the bottle didn't break, and the wine is still drinkable.

So here's the mystery: where the hell did the cork go?

I'm in the midst of a fridge clean-up, obviously, and I wound up going through everything in the freezer after taking the wine out, and as I finished up that, I realized the cork was nowhere to be found.

I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for it, but I always prefer to come up with the unreasonable explanation.  Like maybe some sort of special freezer wormhole was created by the velocity of the cork being expelled.  Maybe the cork is now happily residing in an alternate universe where it frolics with stray socks and that rebate check that never showed up.

And because I don't like to have a post utterly devoid of practical information, here's a wine tip: the wine guy I met through the cooking school says go ahead and freeze your wine if you can't finish the bottle.  (Make sure you have drunk some of it, unlike me, at least one glass, to avoid creating your own freezer wormhole, and then take out to thaw on the countertop the AM of the eve you plan to drink it.)  He says it would not hold up, quality-wise, after thawing, if you have a freshly opened bottle to compare it to side-by-side.  But since you probably won't be doing that, it should taste just fine.

And if you still have some wine leftover after that, check out KCRW's September 27th episode of Good Food.  Evan Kleinman talks with Du Vin Wine's Stacie Hunt about some uses for leftover wine, including "turning wine into vinegar, making ice cubes, using them as sauce starters, baking cookies and creating an appetizer."

Comments

[Haddyr]

Didn't you have something else explode in your freezer a year ago that actually pushed the door open? Maybe you need a special freezer timer. :)

I'll bet the cork lodged itself inside a bag of frozen peas, or something. Any mysterious holes in the things you pulled out?

[Leslie Seaton]

Yes, yes, I did! I had forgotten about that.

I think that incident was the first time after a gazillion years of putting seltzer in the freezer to cool down (and, as I do 80% of the time, forgetting I did that) that the bottle actually exploded. I know you are not supposed to do that with carbonated stuff but I'd literally done it hundreds of times sans incident before that 3AM wake up call. In fact, along with the bottle of wine involved in this freezer explosion, there was a bottle of forgotten seltzer in there as well, but it was better-behaved.

Some kind of timer would probably be a good idea, except that I would do with it what I do with all timers, namely shut it off and still forget to do what the thing was beeping to tell me to do.

I did have one piece of frozen salmon with a mysterious tear in the package, but as the salmon could not hide an entire cork, I could only presume the cork ricocheted off of it before coming to a complete stop, wherever that might be. No other packages appeared to have been affected. I'm still voting for the alternate universe answer.

[Rube]

Maybe there was no cork; maybe it was a screw top which just blew out. Or, more likely, there WAS a cork, but it penetrated the brane between this and an alternate universe, where a woman named Leslie is discovering TWO corks in the freezer, next to her popped bottle of wine. And some idiot named Rube it trying to explain how they got there on HER blog. Check under the peas.