Really nice wine pairing Jamie!
The thing that my wines teacher from school said to me that resonated the most was when you're wine tasting, you're never wrong. Nobody can tell you what you smell or taste, so if you get a hint of something, to you it's there. Now, that said, wine tasting isn't a talent, it's a skill, so the more you do it, the better you'll get. While you may not be able to differentiate right away, you'll quickly realize that you recognize aromas and things more often. Pretty much everyone in my class was tasting wine at a basic level before the 3 week mark, but that was doing an average of 8 wines a day, 5 days a week (I loved my school).
Like Cindy said, letting a wine breathe for a while is best. With young wines it'll coax out aromas as well as help soften the harshness.
As far as the whole cork thing goes, the cork shortage is actually a common myth; cork is actually a really sustainable product, and there are some fun facts like there is enough cork that you could cork every bottle of wine consumed in the US for the next 100 years. The scarcity idea came out of the fact that around '01 or '02 cork got a lot more expensive, so wineries started to switch to alternative closures because it became harder for them to get. The alternative closures were initially developed to prevent cork taint. I can go into lots of technical detail about how cork taint works and all that fun stuff, but I don't anyone here deserves that kind of torture so the short of it is when people talk about wines being 'corked', they're usually talking about flaws produced by the cork itself (I've worked with a lot of people who just like to complain and say the wine is bad, rather than admit that it's just not to their taste, so don't always believe people when they say a wine is 'corked' :p). Depending on who you read, somewhere between 0.7% and 9% of wines suffer from some form of cork taint though. Anyway, all of the modern closures came into being in a way to fight cork taint. Screw caps, synthetic 'corks', and vino-lok aren't a bad things or anything to be concerned about with a wine, but they do change the way that the bottle ages drastically. Cork is still the best in terms of bottle aging wine long-term. There's also something to be said about the whole ceremony aspect of opening a wine for guests or customers or whatever it may be.
Quote from: luna nyan on June 04, 2012, 08:28:38 AM
Stelvin caps - very common in lower to midrange wines in Australia. The higher end ones still are corked.
I quite like them for the convenience factor, especially on wines that I'm not going to cellar. The rate of a Stelvin cap failing versus cork taint is lower as well.
Most Aussie wines are good value for what they are overseas, I just like whinging about the fact that they're usually more expensive at home! The only criticism I have for Aussie wines is that on the average, the alcohol content tends to be a bit on the higher side.
^This
