How to Select a Good Wine Glass

 What’s the best glass for wine? The one you’re holding.

We’re only half joking. Wine in a plastic cup on vacation always tastes delicious, and the tumblers at our favorite Italian place are just fine with that big carafe of rustic red wine. It’s also true, though, that an elegant, comfortable and well-designed

handmade vintage bohemian glass wine glass with art casting can make the experience of wine that much more pleasant. And there’s good news here: There has never been a wider selection of good stemware available at affordable prices.

For almost a decade now, our everyday glass has been Spiegelau “Vino Grande” Burgundy, which is so comfortable to us that it seems like an old shoe. Everybody needs new shoes from time to time, though, so we decided it was time to conduct a broad search to find a new everyday glass. We shopped in person and online.

While there are many different kinds of glasses for many different kinds of wine — flutes for sparklers, small glasses for dessert wine and some boast that they deliver specific wines best to specific taste buds and so on — everyone needs a good, solid, everyday glass to use for both reds and whites without thinking about it. You know: the kind of stemware you just reflexively pick up when you come home after a long day. That’s what we were looking for in this tasting. Here were our parameters as we searched:

— Twenty ounces or more. We like large bowls in which our small pour of wine, whether red or white, has plenty of room to breathe and we can swish and swirl to our hearts’ content. We eliminated any glass that was less than 20 ounces or, online, didn’t reveal the size.

— Clear glass. We want to see our wine. In addition, thin glass is better than thick glass because we like to taste wine instead of glass and thick stemware can get heavy.

— Long stem so we can hold it comfortably. Those stemless tumblers we see at restaurants sometimes are fun as a change of pace, but we wouldn’t use them as everyday glasses.

— Slight inward curve at the top. This focuses the aromas.

— $15 or less. In fact, almost all of the glasses we liked were $12.50 or less, and many were less than $10. We don’t want to spend too much on our everyday glasses because then we don’t have to worry about breaking them; the angst would make using them less pleasurable.

With those fences around our choices, we ended up with 25 different glasses. We bought them at places as disparate as Wal-Mart, Target and Sur la Table. In the past, we have bought some lovely stemware at Costco, but we haven’t seen special glasses there in some time and didn’t see any when we were searching this time. We found the widest selection, of course, at wine-specific Web sites such as wineenthusiast.com. A number of glasses we picked up are from the various Riedel lines. Riedel is the big name in fine glasses and now it has all sorts of different, well-crafted lines at various price points.

A fine everyday glass, to us, is like great movie music. It doesn’t demand attention on its own but enhances the mood and action at every moment. It’s a very personal issue of how it feels in our hands and how it delivers the smells and tastes of the wine. We want a glass to be both sensual and unfussy, which can be a difficult trick.

We placed all 25 glasses on the table and studied them. It’s amazing how different yet similar they were, truly an outstanding cornucopia of wine glasses. We quickly eliminated 14 from our competition. There wasn’t anything dramatically wrong with any of them, but we found some too heavy and thick; some too narrow (so tastes and smells got trapped); some too wide (so tastes and smells got away from us) and some simply boring. Some teetered on stems so thin and tall that they frightened us. We also eliminated a glass from Schott Zwiesel called “Tritan Diva Burgundy,” even though we both liked it. We thought with its particularly long stem that it felt simply too big and grand for everyday use, not to mention that six of them would pretty much fill our entire kitchen. Still, we thought they’d be fun glasses to use when we have company and they’d be great with very big, young reds that needed plenty of air. They simply seemed a bit overwhelming for everyday use.

We then spent several days using the remaining 11 glasses with a variety of red and white wines. We wanted something that felt comfortable to us, with nice balance, some elegance and which added to our enjoyment of the wine. All of that is highly personal — as personal as wine itself — so others might have chosen differently.

We’re happy to say that our five favorites came from four different producers and five different stores. Our favorites, and the reasons we liked them, are listed in the attached index. Having used all of them now for a few weeks, we can tell you we’re quite fond of all of them and happy to have them as part of our household.

A nice set of stemware is always a good gift — for novices or experts, for people who have few glasses in the house or many. As wine lovers, we can assure you that we can never have enough everyday glasses. But don’t wait for someone to give you glassware. Our guess is that most wine lovers out there — like us — use their everyday glasses for years, until they break them. We’d urge you to spend some time this weekend buying a new set of everyday glasses for yourself. Just because they are a little bit different, they will make your wine-drinking experience a little bit fresher, a little bit more pleasurable, a little bit more fun. And all that for the price of one good bottle of wine.