It's a question that's been tossed around for centuries, since the first cork was popped: How long does wine keep once it's been opened?

As with all things wine, it depends on many factors. Red wine, white wine, young wine, old wine, the list goes on. Oxidation is both a friend and an enemy. A freshly opened bottle often benefits from sitting open for a few minutes before serving in order to allow the oxygen to seep in and bring out the flavors and aromas in their full-bodied glory, but too much time exposed to the air and all those wonderful characteristics start to slowly turn unpleasant and eventually the wine will be dull, sour, and not nearly as fragrant. It's a slow process and it really comes down to personal taste, because no matter how long an opened bottle sits it won't become unsafe to drink -- just unpleasant.

The quick, very general answer on how long an opened bottle of wine keeps is 3 days. All wines will keep at least one day without changing for the worst, and many aged reds can last up to a week. Factors to keep in mind:

• The age of the wine The longer the wine was aged the longer it will retain its desirable characteristics after being opened. Young wine is more susceptible to the effects of oxidation.
• How much is left The fuller the bottle the longer the wine will last, due to less room for oxygen. Consider transferring leftovers into a smaller bottle
  
• Sugar and alcohol content Sugar and alcohol act as preservatives so dessert wines, ports, and sherries can keep much longer (up to a year in some cases).

When it doubt smell it and taste it. If you like it drink it! If you don't, either discard it or find another use for it. There are no hard and fast rules so make your own.

Wine, food and beautiful surroundings are the lures of the Taste Of The Beach Florida event. The four-day culinary and cultural celebration runs from November 5-8, 2009 on Northwest Florida's Gulf Coast and benefits children's charities. The festival is comprised of seven events ranging from wine tastings and film screenings to winemaker dinners and a charity auction all taking place in an area full of white sand beaches, boutiques and golf courses and other temptations. This stretch of Florida includes Escambia, Destin, Panama City Beach and many other towns an area that is often too warm in the summer months but very pleasant in the fall.

This year's events includes: Taste of The Harbor, Taste of Bay Wine & Food Experience, Al Fresco Reserve Tasting at Ruskin Place, Telluride MountainFilm on Tour, Seeing Red Wine Festival, a series of wine maker dinners at area restaurants, and the Taste of The Beach & Charity Auction. Various events range from $35 to $145. Tickets are available at the Taste of the Beach website.

Many of the finest restaurants have a "sommelier" on staff, which is the French term for cellar master or wine steward. A sommelier is a trained wine professional who can recommend wines that will well-accompany the food that is being served. A Master Sommelier is an expert who has passed four levels of examinations offered by the Court of Master Sommeliers, an international examining body. They can speak with authority the principal grape varieties used in wine making and the areas of the world where they are cultivated. A person holding a Master Sommelier Diploma is an expert not only in wines, but also spirits and other alcoholic beverages.

Tipping a sommelier directly is customary if you feel he or she spent a great deal of time discussing wine selections with you in addition to opening, pouring or decanting the wine. Keep in mind that at most restaurants, the gratuity (15% to 20% for good service; more than that for outstanding service) paid on the total bill (including the wine) is divided formulaically among the servers, sommelier, bartender and runners.

Maximilian Riedel of the famous Austrian Riedel wine glass family hosted a tasting this week which taught me more about wine than any wine tasting I've been to in years. How? Because it wasn't a wine tasting. It was a glassware tasting.

I knew the basics. I knew you're not supposed to drink white out of red glasses or red out of champagne flutes (or coffee mugs, but hey, we all went to college), but there was a lot I didn't know I didn't know about how much the shape of a glass can affect the taste and experience of a wine.

For example -- did you know that the basic near-spherical globe glass was designed for white? Chardonnay, to be specific. Also, according to Riedel, you should be drinking most champagnes out of the same glasses from which you should be drinking pinot noir. And wait till you see them.

Riedel Glas Austria's basic cabernet glass is the most highly produced and best selling wine glass in the world -- but, in fact, they recommend a much larger glass for cabernet, one they began making when they finally purchased their own machinery in 2004.

The big lesson I learned today? Grape specific glasses -- and they're not the ones you think they are. Click here to visit the Riedel website and shop by grape (even esoterics), but not before you click through the gallery below for more information and specifics.

Thomas Keller's Per Se restaurant in New York City is launching a new series of wine dinners called An American Table at Per Se. The series explores American winemaking through three different themes expressed with three different winemaker-hosted dinners one on May 28, the next on June 11 and the final one on June 22. Each dinner will consist of a standing reception followed by a seated dinner with a tasting menu paired with wine selections served in Per Se's private dining room. Chef de Cuisine Jonathan Benno will create each evening's special menu and Head Sommelier Roxane Shafee-Moghadam will join each winemaker to help with guest questions.

The series launches on May 28th with Wells Guthrie of Copain Wine Cellars who will discuss old world inspiration in American winemaking. He will share his own wines along with additional selections from some of his most beloved French winemakers and influencers including Jean-Louis Chave, Sylvain Cathiard and Thierry Allemand.

On June 11, Per Se hosts a discussion on the importance of the land with Greg Brewer of Brewer-Clifton, Melville Winery and Diatom Wines. The six-course tasting menu will be designed to bridge the regional reference points, from Japan to Chablis, reflected in Brewer's accompanying wine pairings.

The third dinner on June 22 looks at modern winemaking with Abe Schoener from Scholium Project. He will showcase a variety of wines from his portfolio including selections from his Southern France collection and a preview of wines from his latest project, Red Hook Winery, an urban winery in the Red Hook region of Brooklyn which produces wine from New York State grapes.

Each dinner costs $325 per person plus tax and reservations are limited.

Love wine and want to move to Sonoma County, California? Have we got a job for you. The Murphy-Goode Winery is offering a "Really Goode Job" for the right person. They will pay $10,000 a month for a six-month contract that includes private housing in Healdsburg, California. The winery is seeking a web-savvy communicator who wants to learn about viticulture, winemaking, Sonoma County and Murphy-Goode wines and share what they have learned through social media tools such as Facebook, blogs, internet videos and Twitter.

Those in San Francisco can get a jump on the application process on April 28 at 11:30 a.m. at 120 Market Street near the Hyatt Regency. Visitors who arrive at the "A Really Goode Job's" purple and white kiosk can meet the boss and get a 24-hour head start in the application process by being provided with a code that will give them immediate access to the www.areallygoodejob.com website which launches on April 29 to the public at large.

The website will have an employment application and will ask applicants to submit a one-minute video. Applications close on June 5, 2009. Murphy-Goode Winery will then select 50 candidates then narrow the list down to the top 10 who will be interviewed from June 27 to July 1. The person chosen for the job will be announced on July 9 and begin work on August 1. As you might expect, all applicants must be at least 21 years old.
[via WKYC]

When it comes to premier tasting events typically Aspen's Food & Wine Classic sits atop the list but another, young event is creeping up in status, easily challenging Aspen's offerings. The picturesque Del Monte Forest, also known as Pebble Beach, hosts the 2nd Annual Pebble Beach Food & Wine Experience from April 16-19 offering exclusive dining, tasting and educational opportunities. Learn and savor culinary excellence from world-renowned chefs, taste some of the most sought-after wines across the globe, and make your own schedule with a la carte choices or package deals. The culmination of 250 legendary wineries and 60 celebrity chefs is too good to miss. Prices start at just $100 for wine tastings and reach $4,750 for four days of VIP access to any of the weekend's festivities.

[via Vinography]

The Alessi Alberto's Vineyard tasting glass does away with the need to have a different glasses for different wines. The glass's asymmetrical shape serves an important purpose. The side that bends out is meant for tasting white wine, exposing it to the air and opening up the fragrance. The side that curves inward is for red wine, trapping and concentrating the aromas. Does it work? The folks at Unica Home say they noticed a difference but then again they're the ones selling the glasses for $97 a pair.

If you have $4.000 to spend on a wine tasting, this might be the one. On September 25, the Ninth Annual benefit "Once-in-a-Lifetime Blockbuster Wine Tasting Dinner" will take place in New York City. It will showcase the 1990 Bordeaux, a year important for its hot, dry weather followed by some thunderstorms and scattered showers in September and October. The stressed grapes which stopped ripening and then quickly started again once the rains came, were a healthy bumper crop that ended up producing one of the best vintages in recent history.

The dinner will include a horizontal tasting of The Vintage of the Century: 1990 Bordeaux with a dozen different wines rated 96 or higher by Robert Parker including five that have been rated a perfect 100. This is a chance to enjoy the type of wines that make even the most experienced tasters go a little week in the knees. Each flight of these offerings from one of the most extraordinary vintages of the 20th century is paired with a matching gourmet dish.

All wines will be donated and the dinner is limited to just 40 participants who will gather in a private townhouse in Greenwich Village. The meal will be prepared by a renowned New York chef, and the wine will be served by members of the Windows on the World sommelier staff. The $4,000 fee will be donated to a "highly respected" 501(c)3 organization and is therefore tax deductible. Participation is by invitation only. More details can be found here.

[Thanks, David]

The Flora Springs Winery in St. Helena, California has one of the most intriguing tasting rooms I've seen in a while. The Room was designed by Joe Miroglio of Miroglio architecture and the stucco stripes are meant to evoke the look of the caves where Flora Springs has been aging their red wines year after year for 30 years. Inside there is a 32-foot, steel and oak tasting bar. There are also private tasting rooms and upper and lower patios terraced by rippling covered roofs. There are tastings at the Popcorn Bar as well as the Temptastings in the Tasting Cave which include food pairings matched to small production wines. Tasting prices range from $15 to $50 for the single vineyard pairing.

Oenophiles mark your calendars for October 23: wine mystic Robert Parker will host an exclusive tasting featuring Bordeaux wines from 2005, what Parker says is "the greatest vintage produced during my thirty year career." For $2,000 per person ($1,000 of which is a charitable donation toward Culinary Institute scholarships), tasters will sample 18 wines, including all five of the Premiers Grand Crus from the Left Bank, which are currently priced at $75,000 a case.

Check out Robert Parker's website to learn more about the wines he favors and to search over 100,000 tasting notes from Parker's extensive database.

If you've ever wanted to be part of a Guinness World Record you might want to check out one of the many pubs across England in the JD Wetherspoon group on May 21. The British pub chain is holding a free wine tasting on May 21 at 6p.m. hoping to get the record for the world's largest synchronized wine tasting. We aren't talking a great vintage here, they are offering free 1.7-ounce servings of Fetzer Coldwater Creek Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Grigio or white Zinfandel but it might be fun to be part of such a huge undertaking.

[via Wine Spectator]

If you've been waiting to get a taste of the much revered wine from Burgundy but through lack of opportunity or funding you have missed out, do not delay your registration for Le Paulée Grand Burgundy tasting taking place in San Francisco on March 1st. Although $300 to attend, the long list of current releases available that day will treat your passion for wine to an event it will never forget. If you have a penchant for vintage Burgundy, than by all means, sign up for the Gala Dinner following the evening tasting, but it will cost you more. Typically an event for New Yorkers, west coast oenophiles will be delighted by the return of the Burgundies and a most memorable event for its second year.

Often when people first get into tasting wines, they feel that many wines taste alike but then as they get deeper into tasting various varietals they begin to notice the differences. But are the differences between the varietals began to disappear in order to satisfy the demands of marketing wines? Roger Dial has written an interesting piece for Appellation America about varietal distinctiveness. In order to test whether or not various red wine varietals are starting to taste alike he gathered a bunch of wine enthusiasts for a tasting of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and Syrah. All the wines were Californian from designated AVAs, and as far as they knew 100 percent varietal. The blind tasting included one relatively high, and one relatively low alcohol version of each variety.

The results were interesting. The Pinot Noir won out with 100% recognition but even with the Pinot included in the stats, the overall varietal distinctiveness score from the expert panel was an unimpressive 43 percent. Without the Pinot in the equation, the varietal distinctiveness factor of the four remaining varietals shrunk to 29 percent. So what does this mean? Are California reds all blurring into one taste profile, a slightly sweet high alcohol fruit bomb? It may be that in the desire to make wines that appeal to a wide variety of palates that some individuality has been lost. It does make a fun tasting game to try at home with friends and see if you can determine which varietal is which. It also raises the question of whether or not varietal preference (as expressed most vehemently by Miles in "Sideways") has become more a question of brand recognition than of actual taste.

The latest in our series of wineries in places in the United States other than California takes us all the way to South Dakota and the Prairie Berry Winery. At Prairie Berry, as you may suspect by the name, they create a whole lot of fruit wines from fruit such as chokecherries, rhubarb and locally raised honey. They also make wines from new grape hybrids that can grow in South Dakota's colder, drier climate. The winery has had particular success with the Frontenac grape, a variety developed in Minnesota to thrive in colder climates. Their 2006 Frontenac, a light and fruity red which has won several awards, sells for $15. The wines are sealed using the Stelvin screwcap closure. The winery also has a tasting room that is open year-round.