The Crocodile Cage

• Wine Glasses
• Customized Champagne Flutes
• Etched Wine Glasses
• Wine Accessories
• Custom Etched Wine Glasses
• Champagne Glasses in Bulk
• Custom Wine Glasses
• Wine Gifts
• Engraved Wine Glasses
• Personalized Wine Glass

While wine experts disagree about many things, they almost unanimously agree that the best way to enjoy a bottle of wine is with friends. Whether it’s a quiet evening spent on the patio, or a large-scale wine tasting event, the company is more important than the wine.

When you’re hosting guests, it’s fun to add a little color and flavor to the evening with wine and refreshments of course, but also with decorations and even planned activities to help keep everyone entertained and interacting with one another. For an event featuring wine, wine related activities work well.

Wine tasting can be an event unto itself, with just a few bottles of wine and some glasses. However, adding note pads for the tasters to record their remarks and then compare notes can make it even more fun. If you mask off the labels on the wine bottles, you can have each taster guess the variety, region and year and turn it into a game. The person with the most correct answers wins a small prize.

With any wine tasting, you’ll want a variety of small food bites to both cleanse the palate and to highlight particular wines. A variety of bite size cheese cubes will complement many of the white wines, while richer foods such as chocolate or a bit of roast beef will bring out the character of a full-bodied red. In between wines, a simple toast or cracker can help cleanse the palate and prepare your guests for the next vintage.

In a true wine tasting, you’ll only pour a smidgeon of each wine for each guest. If you are tasting five or six wines, that’ll be plenty and you don’t want your guests falling down on the way out at the end of the evening. You might pour perhaps an inch of wine into each glass. That’s enough to allow guests to see the color and clarity of the wine, enjoy the bouquet, and have enough to fully sample the flavor.

Because there may be so many glasses floating around the room, it’s a good idea to place wine glass charms on each glass to help your guests identify their own glass throughout the evening. Wine glass charms are little decorative rings that fit over the stem of the glass. Each one in the set will have a unique color or design that makes it easy to tell them apart. In fact, wine glass charms should be used at any large gathering where the guests are moving their drinks around the room to avoid those awkward discussions of is this mine or yours?

Whatever the excuse you use, getting together with friends and having a good time is the goal. Enjoying a few nice wines with them is just a bonus.

• Personalized Glassware
• Personalized Shot Glasses
• Personalized Pint Glasses
• Personalized Beer Glasses
• Personalized Beer Mug
• Engraved Shot Glasses
• Engraved Glasses
• Personalized Glass
• Customized Shot Glasses
• Personalized Beer Mugs

In some things, the old ways are the best, and in other things modern advances can provide strong improvements. One process that has definitely improved with modern technology is glass etching.

Glass can be etched in several ways. One of the most common methods from just a few decades ago was chemical etching. This process often used a very strong solution of hydrochloric acid or a fluoride compound to eat away the portions of the glass surface where etching was desired. The process generally required the person performing the etching to wear protective equipment to prevent burns from spilled or splashed. Inhaling the fumes could also be quite harmful if the proper precautions were not taken. As far as the finished product was concerned, the quality of the result depended upon making sure the acid solution stayed where it was supposed to. This could be accomplished by using an adhesive stencil to mask the parts of the glass that were to remain unaltered. However, if not done very carefully, the acid could seep under the edges of the stencil and leave somewhat ragged edges on the design. Then, of course, the used chemicals must be disposed of as well.

Mechanical etching used a high speed rotary bit to mill the glass and engrave a design on the portions of the glass that needed to be etched. Milling machines could be computer controlled and programmed to repeat the exact same design over and over again.

Designs could also be etched by sandblasting. This process used an abrasive to wear away the glass that was to be etched. The sand blasting could be controlled by carefully directing the high pressure stream of the abrasive compound or through the use of a stencil.

Perhaps the most modern of all the glass etching techniques is laser etching. Again, the laser can be computer controlled and can draw the same designs time and time again. Lasers however, have the additional advantage of producing extremely sharp edges and clean, sharp lines. Lasers also have no difficulty with etching on irregular or three dimensional surfaces. Complex images can be etched into shaped objects like champagne flutes with no distortion and no risk of cracking the glass.

If you want an etched glass product made with the greatest precision on any surface, lasers re the way to go. Without harsh chemicals involved, it is also a more environmentally friendly process than some of the others. The set up process is simple and quick and often results in a lower overall charge for laser etched products.