Though more amusing than the usual wine-accessory pitches I get regularly — stain remover! plastic beach glasses! the next game-changing app! — I simply ignored the first couple of emails from a publicist advertising a vial full of crystals that was supposed to make your wine smoother. The Vino Vial was the latest product from a German company called VitaJuwel, whose founder, Ewald Eisen, believes that certain crystals can make water healthier.
But persistence pays off, so a few weeks ago, I was in our conference room, sipping on a glass of Dunn Vineyards Howell Mountain 2012 cabernet from Napa — $150 a bottle and, yeah, damn good — while waiting about seven minutes for the magic gems to do their stuff on the second glass of cab. I was trying to come up with a way to politely but firmly tell the Vino Vial’s American distributor, the very nice and professional longtime luxury jewelry dealer Anjanette Sinesio, that the whole thing was wacko. And then, when the time was right, I sipped the crystal-enhanced Dunn.
“Huh!” I immediately uttered in that universal “wow” tone.