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WHEN IT POURS IT REIGNS. By Bill Ditenhafer – Nashville Lifestyles It’s amazing how long we put up with things that don’t work or buy products that work poorly just because they’re all that’s available. Millennia passed with humankind lugging their belongings around on stretchers supported by poles that dragged on the ground instead of wheels. Eons went by before someone thought to invent the umbrella. And until just a few years ago, wine connoisseurs the world over had access only to an inadequate and clumsy system of decanting that had barely evolved from biblical times. That’s where Nashvillian Jim Moore comes in. As an engineer, I’m always trying to make things easier,” says Moore, whose company, WineDown Accessories, sells the (given the wine decanter’s glacial pace for improvements) fantastically futuristic RoJaus Wine Decanters. And yet, the product – a gracefully designed device that both exposes the wine to air, thereby setting its flavors free, and decants it – is anything but futuristic. Like Post-it notes or paperclips, the RoJaus is elegant in its simplicity, so much so that it’s hard to believe no one thought of it before. But they didn’t. Even now, as the young company is searching for four more distributors around the country to go along with the two already on board (Chicago and, of course, the southeast’s base in Nashville), oenophiles are pouring their wines with traditional bell-shaped decanters, but with the intention of exposing as much of the wine it contains to the air as possible. But aside from the fact that these designs are inherently awkward – typically the base of the vessel spreads out dramatically, which is called “the pancake effect,” to allow more surface area for the wine to meet the air, and in the process taking on the form, more often than not, of a French Horn – they also don’t do their jobs all that well. At least not when compared to the RoJaus. “It’s an artistic fixture with a process imbedded in it,” explains Moore, lapsing into engineer speak. “When you pour the wine onto the bubble, the surface tension wraps the wine around the wine bubble which exposes every bit of the wine to the air. Then it just collects in the decanter and it’s ready for dispensing. In other words, Moore’s product does the important work during the pour, after which it awaits, fully aerated, to be released tap-like into a glass. The key element in the design, the wine bubble, is filled less than halfway with treated water, which helps keep the bubble stationary for decanting red wines and helps chill white wines when frozen. It also happens to be mesmerizing, which is an obvious part of the product’s attraction in the first place, but has put one or two wine pros off – at least until they have tasted the fruits of its labor. Far more often, though, the combination of the beautiful, hand-blown glass, the personalized design features and the hypnotic flow of the wine (who knew physics could be fun?) enchant those exposed to the product. “Form follows function – that’s been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union,” Frank Lloyd Wright famously said. And you don’t get much more spiritual than when you’re well into your second bottle of perfectly decanted wine.
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