Wine Glasses: Are They Worth It?
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| Wine Glasses |
What’s in a wine glass? Well, besides wine, I mean.
It’s a constant battle in my house: my girlfriend prefers drinking wine from a little juice tumbler and I love enormous, elegant wine glasses. But is the wine any better in them? Here are four reasons I’m right and, ahem, she’s wrong. Ha!
They Look Nice
I have to admit, one of the biggest reasons I like wine glasses is for their aesthetics. Sure, it makes for a lot of dishes to wash, but my mouth starts to water just sitting down at a table set with a gaggle of glasses: one for water, another for sparkling wine, a third for white, and a big bowl for the red. Yumm! I know I’m in for something special.
But they’re practical too. For instance, the wine glass’s stem keeps you from getting fingerprints all over the bowl. After all, wine is a beautiful thing to admire and who wants smudges all over the glass?
Temperature
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The stem also keeps you from warming up the wine with your hands. The temperature of a wine drastically changes how it tastes. The colder it is, the more you sense the harder, harsher components: bitter (tannins) and sour (acidity). Warmer temperatures bring out the alcohol and sweetness in a wine.
That’s why you usually drink white wines chilled and red wines closer to room temperature. You want to heighten the crisp acidity in the white, and bring out the full-bodied, softer characteristics in the red.
Aromas
Again, that stem comes into play to appreciate the aromas too — at least if you have smelly hands. Maybe you just washed them and they smell like soap or, worse, you just filled up your gas tank. The farther away they are from your nose, the better.
But more importantly, the bowl shape of the glass allows you to swirl the wine without spilling it all over the place. Swirling releases different aromas that concentrate in the narrow rim at the top of the glass. A wine’s bouquet is among its greatest assets, and a well-made glass makes it easier to pick out the aromas.
Taste?
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| Tongue Map |
But can a glass make your wine taste better? According to Riedel, one of the leading wine glass makers, even the shape of the glass makes a significant difference in the flavors. “The wine flow is directed onto the appropriate taste zones of your palate and consequently leads to different taste pictures,” they claim.
Too bad for them, that’s based on a theory nobody believes anymore. The myth says that you taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter in different “taste zones” of the tongue. But it turns out that’s all founded on Harvard Professor Edwin Boring’s (I’ll bet his lectures were stimulating, poor guy!), misinterpretation of a 1901 paper written in German. We’ve known for decades that taste buds all over the tongue pick up each category pretty darned well.
So?
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| Unbreakable Glass |
My girlfriend and I did a taste test of one wine in a bunch of different glasses. Even she agreed it tasted best in one of the wine glasses, but that still didn’t convince her. She doesn’t really hate wine glasses; she just hates breaking them.
So we’ve found a solution, and signed a peace treaty. Spiegelau makes a glass that has “… a high breakage resistance …” and we bought four of those.
The only problem is … we’re already down to three.
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