Ask not what your bottled water can do for you; ask what it can do for homeless children in Kenya, America’s polluted waterways, and the growing scrap heaps of our disposable society.

So say a growing number of bottled-water brands that build their sales strategies around socially conscious causes. Call it hydrating for humanity. The intentions may be pure, but how’s the water? We tapped Blaue Gans sommelier Aldo Sohm, a veteran of a ground-breaking water tasting in his native Austria (tap beat out all the bottled brands), to test the ecofriendly waters.

Rosé wine is made from red grape-varieties. And, nowadays, many winemakers mix a certain amount of white grapes with the red.

The elaboration of rosé wine is delicate. It is probably why the amateur is sometimes disappointed by the quality of a rosé. Particularity, European rosé is "dry". On the contrary, American rosé is sweet and similar to white wine.

Rosé is the wine-marketing sensation of the summer, but how does the sparkling version fare for holiday parties? With the help of master sommelier Joshua Wesson, CEO of Best Cellars, we tasted 24 bubbly rosés and came up with the best.

Europeans drink thirty-five million bottles of cognac each year. That's a lot of cognac, and most of it isn't particularly good. To meet growing demand, cognac producers have shifted to mass production, and today the typical bottle of cognac is one-dimensional, industrial and boring.

But hope is not lost for lovers of fine French brandy. As with many French wine-and-spirits designations, cognac is the name of a place, and just to the south of Cognac, in Gascony, is Armagnac. There you'll find true artisans making brandies of far superior quality on a much smaller scale. And it costs less.

In the popular wine-touring regions (Napa, Bordeaux, Champagne and even Long Island during peak tourist season), strangers are dispatched on group tours with summer interns as their guides.

Every tour is the same: These are the tanks where we ferment our grapes; these are the barrels where we age our reserve wines; now let's taste some of our cheapest ones.

Questions are met with a blank stare, and tasting opportunities are very limited.

Being a good sommelier isn't about knowing every wine producer and vintage in the universe.

It's about pairing wine with food -- specifically, with the cuisine of a particular chef in a particular restaurant. After all, when you strip away all the fancy names, technical data and extreme adjectives, wine is really just a beverage that we drink with food.

When customers ask me how I know which wines go well with which foods, my answer often disappoints. It's not because I possess some secret text or oenological database.

What is decanting? Simply put, it means transferring the contents of a wine bottle into another receptacle before serving.

It may sound silly (how can pouring wine from one vessel into another make it taste better?), but it works.

Wine geeks love to sit around for hours and debate the pros and cons of this procedure, but I'm confident -- based on my experience of opening, decanting and tasting hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine -- that careful decanting can improve most any wine.

When wine is too cold, you can hardly taste it. When it's too warm, it tastes flabby and diffuse. But most wine, whether it's consumed at home or in restaurants, is served at the wrong temperature.

Back in the day, two benchmarks controlled wine service: The temperature of the wine cellar (about 55ºF) and room temperature (which, in a European castle, would be in the low 60s). You served your whites at cellar temperature, or maybe chilled in an ice bucket for a few minutes, and your reds at room temperature. Perfect.

Before you can drink a bottle of wine, you have to get it open. Whether you succeed or fail at that mission depends on your equipment.

Especially with old and rare wines, your choice of corkscrew can make the difference between pulling the cork out in one piece and fishing it out in a million bits.

But even with younger wines with hearty new corks, it's far more pleasurable -- and less exhausting -- to open them with a good corkscrew.

One of the most common wine questions I get is, "How do you tell if a bottle of a wine that you got at a restaurant is bad? I never know when to send one back."

Let me start by saying what does not constitute a bad bottle.

A bottle is not bad just because you don't like the wine. There are many variations in wine-making style, so a bottle that doesn't suit your preferences is not necessarily defective. Of course, the sommelier should help you select a bottle that's to your liking, but ultimately only you are responsible for your personal tastes.

Try this experiment with a ten-Euro bottle of red wine: Pour some into any old goblet and some into a proper tulip-shaped crystal Bordeaux glass. Taste. I guarantee you'll think you're drinking two different wines.

The glass you choose has a tremendous impact on your enjoyment of wine.  Even unremarkable wines taste more elegant and refined when served in suitable stemware.

And the finest wines are all but wasted if you drink them out of coffee mugs. The acquisition of excellent stemware is the first step towards improving your in-home wine experience.