JANUARY is a time for offloading unwanted Christmas gifts on eBay. Among them should be certain wine accessories. Wine paraphernalia manufacturers assume Christmas' bright lights turn ordinary people into gadget fetishists, offering us flappy-paddle corkscrews, electric suction pumps, argon gas preserving canisters and combination lock wine stoppers. Who put James Bond's master of invention, 'Q', in charge of wine gadgets? Flappy-paddle corkscrews take three hands to operate and the self-congratulation that comes with using one is diminished by the silly feeling you've used a folding helicopter to cross the street. Very Plenty O'Toole.
Full article first published in The Connexion (January 2011).
Photograph of Plenty O'Toole by Nye Bradley.
