Other than share with you the fact that Burrows Lightbourn Limited does have what I feel is an extensive selection of wine from around the world that you can find in our own shops, as well as many of our fine supermarkets, wine stores, wineonline.bm and restaurants, I am not going to address any specific one today.

Rather than that I hope to give you a couple of tips on better enjoying wine in general. When folks ask me if they should let a wine breathe I will normally respond by holding the bottle up to my ear and pretending to listen for any gasps or panting for air.

My point being that there is no oxygen starved animal inside, just a lovely liquid that will benefit from “airing” and reacting chemically to open up.

With a young wine think of unwrapping a deck of cards and you know that there are many layers, but they are rather stuck together.

You fan them in your hand to get air between them and separate each card (layer) so that you can appreciate each one on its own.

For me the benchmark is a balance of these layers and how they complement each other and just like a royal straight flush, when they work in harmony the result is unbeatable!

Just remember that when you pull a cork or remove a screw cap you only expose an area of wine about the size of a dime and you can wait until the cows come home before there is any change.

Pour the wine in a glass or decant it, in fact when you do the latter with an inexpensive wine it will also benefit and this treatment will impress your friends and add a touch of class.

If you seek out any of those newly arrived Bordeaux reds from the 2009 vintage, that I referred to last week, then please decant them and wait for at least an hour before tasting.

Older wines need to be decanted if they have any sediment in the bottom of the bottle as you do not wish to end up with this in your glass.

If you happen to open a really old wine, and by this I mean twenty five or more years, then you may wish to just carefully pour in your glass as the sudden introduction to oxygen can trigger a very fast reaction and you can literally taste the wine changing from one sip, or glass, to the next.

Your finest Chardonnays can also benefit from “opening up” and so decanting is not limited to reds.

Then there is the glass in which you serve your wine and they honestly make an enormous difference to the overall enjoyment, and beyond any doubt they influence the tasting experience.

You are all familiar with lead crystal and it is the oxide of this metal that helps create such a bright and wonderful container for your favourite wine.

We have recently imported a selection of glasses that are made by infusing titanium with glass and they are not only beautiful in looks, but their tensile strength is greatly enhanced and chipping or cracking are far less likely to happen.

These can be found in our shop on Harbour Road in Paget and they are not expensive.

We have a 26 ounce Pinot Noir glass that has the correct large balloon shape so that the delicate aromas and bouquet (there is a difference) can expand and then be forced up through the narrowing opening at the top.

The Cabernet Sauvignon glass at 16¾ ounces is quite small but they are designed to reveal, but also not overemphasise the experience of rich New World Cabernet.

Our glass for Bordeaux reds, if filled to the rim would hold 20 ounces, but with the customary five or so ounces poured the wine will reveal itself splendidly.

We also stock a 12¾ ounce Chardonnay glass that is perfect for this grape and I would certainly suggest it for Champagne as well.

I have just read where one of the world’s most famous makers of fine crystal glasses has said that by the time that he dies he really hopes that sparkling wine flutes are a thing of the past!

Michael Robinson is Director of Wine at Burrows, Lightbourn Ltd. He can be contacted at mrobinson@bll.bm or on 295-0176. Burrows, Lightbourn have stores in Hamilton (Front Street East, 295-1554), Paget (Harbour Road, 236-0355) and St George’s (York Street, 297-0409). A selection of their wines, beers and spirits are available online at www.wineonline.bm.