The last time I was in Denmark I was 18, and what is left of my memory bank has no recollection of A Hereford Beefstouw, which has existed since the 1970s.
It is a funny, awkward-sounding name to the English-speaker's ear, but apparently on the tip of everyone's tongue in the Scandinavian country, where the restaurant chain enjoys great popularity.
While checking out the new airport, we decided to lunch at this smartly designed Danish-modern steakhouse import.
I was looking through A Hereford Beefstouw's taut and terrific wine list, with 30 highly respectable Old and New World selections, the majority hovering around the $270 mark, when something in the background caught my eye. It was an unusual contraption, 1.2 to 1.5 metres across, of clear plastic tubes, troughs, mini-chutes and channels through which flowed a red liquid.
A gimmicky tourist attraction perhaps? Not at all, said Kevin Tsang, manager and sommelier. This was an invention of the restaurant's founder, a wine-lover, and it was being used to aerate their house wine (a lovely Wolf Blass Shiraz Merlot at $45 by the glass). Well, I thought, now I have seen everything.
The wine is stored beneath the table and pumped up to the top of the three levels where it commences to flow slowly downward until it fills up - according to its computerised gauge - the waiting carafe or single glass. The whole process takes about a minute.
I know about the advantages of letting a wine 'breathe' - it lets 'closed' vintage wines 'open up' and astringent, highly tannic, harsher wines 'soften up' - but this was another thing entirely.
Yet I was assured this mad-scientist affair worked like a charm to expose more of the wine faster than an open bottle ever could.
One of my luncheon companions seemed blase. When I inquired, she confided that her mother, a barrister of sound mind and body - to achieve the desired result - often whips up her vin de table in her blender. Well, I thought, now I have heard everything, too.
But as a wise friend advised years ago when I eyed the quivering tentacles of my now-favourite dish of sauteed squid in its own ink: 'Don't knock it till you've tried it.'