Don't let them fool you: Wine glasses matter

 I’m prompted by a recent unfortunate glassware incident at a restaurant to talk about why the glass you drink your wine from matters.


Here’s what happened last Saturday night at restaurant, somewhere in one of the wine regions of New York state.


I ordered a half carafe of a gruner veltliner that the restaurant had on tap. My friend ordered a half carafe of pinot noir, also on tap. I’m a little obsessed with wines on tap. The environmental impact of a wine from a large container that will be recycled is considerably less than a wine in bottle that probably get thrown away. Plus, wine on tap seems so European.


Instead of carafes, the wine was served in milk bottles, which were nontraditional but just as effective as carafes. Instead of wine glasses, we were brought 3-inch shot glasses, which were nontraditional but not at all as effective as wine glasses.

At tables all around us, there was wine in wineglasses, so the shot glasses were confusing. The explanation the waiter gave us was something I’d never heard before.


“We’re running low on stemware tonight, so you get to drink your wine like a gangster,” he said.


Besides being inappropriate (he was implying Italians who sometimes drink their wine out of juice glasses are mobsters), he was wrong. What he brought us were not juice glasses. They had a diameter of about an inch and a half, completely useless for enjoying wine.

Here’s why. About 80 percent of what we taste doesn’t happen because on our tongues; it happens because of our noses. Our brains interpret the aromas we smell when we eat or drink as taste. Try holding your nose when you eat something and you’ll find that you lose a lot of the nuances of taste. If you’re eating something sugary, you’ll still have the sensation of sweet, but you’ll lose specific flavors.


If you can’t smell the wine you’re drinking, you won’t be able to really taste it. The small glass I was given didn’t allow for any swirling which would have brought oxygen into the wine, oxygen that would have helped to bring out some of the aromas in the wine.


Even if I had somehow managed to swirl a bit in that tiny glass to add some oxygen, the inch and a half opening in a glass didn’t allow me to get my nose into the glass to smell it. The wine tasted very dull.


Glassware matters

If you were concerned that this was going to be a directive to go out and buy 10 different types of stemware so that you always have the right glass for the right wine varietal, hopefully by now you’ll realize that’s not what this is.




You can drink wine out of a glass with no stem, whether it’s the currently popular stemless wine glass or a juice glass. What’s most important is having an opening diameter on the glass that’s large enough for you to be able to breathe in the wine’s aromas.

Of course, a good brass casted wine glass is designed to enhance aroma even more. It will allow you to swirl without making a mess (yet I still manage to do so once in a while). It will be wider about a third of the way up from the stem to allow a sufficient surface area for aromas to escape and then become narrower – yet still wide enough at the top to get your nose into — to concentrate those aromas so you can get a good whiff.


A stemless wine glass usually allows for all of this, but a stem allows you to hold the glass without having to put your hands on the bowl and affecting the temperature of the wine with your body heat. When you see people holding their wine glasses by the stem, it’s not because they’re being pretentious.


You don’t need an entire cabinet in your kitchen dedicated to various types of stemware to be able to enjoy wine. One well designed wine glass will do for almost all the wines you choose to drink, even sparkling wine which also benefits from an opening that’s wide enough for you to get a good inhale. I use flutes for celebratory toasts only. Otherwise, I drink my bubbles from a larger wine glass.


But, if you don’t have any stemware, or for whatever reason you don’t want to use stemware, make sure whatever glass you’re drinking wine from allows you to properly smell the wine so you can taste it.

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