What’s in a Wine Glass?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
What’s in a wine glass? Hopefully, wine!
What makes a wine glass? The shape.
Don’t believe me? Heck, I didn’t believe it until the other night.
We were drinking a very nice bottle of wine and waxing poetic about the various flavors and tastes and smells in this wine. Out of nowhere my wife asks me to trade glasses with her. “What for?” I ask. After all, I have my favorite wine glass that I drink out of and she has her favorite glass that she drinks out of. However, the glasses are different shapes.
Forget about the fact that both of these glasses have white wine in them. You know that as a Level 4 I rarely drink white wine. Our glasses were full of red wine! My glass is on the left and Robin’s glass is on the right.
My wife always likes to show me up about her wine glass and tease me about how attached I am to mine but I indulge her and swap glasses for a taste of wine. What followed was interesting…I got a different set of tastes from her glass than I did from my own glass. She experienced the same thing.
Hmm…looks like those Riedel people are on to something after all.
But why did it taste different? My immediate discovery was that I was able to put my nose further into her glass than I was my own. This led to different aroma qualities as well as the fact that when I took a drink/taste I wasn’t required to tilt my head back as far as when I drank from my own glass. This results in the wine hitting further back on my tongue initially and therefore producing a different set of flavors. They weren’t entirely different but they were different and enhanced.
When drinking out of my own preferred glass I can’t get my nose in as deep and my head tilt causes the wine to hit the front of my tongue first. This results in some different, enhanced flavors.
What I noticed with the wine we were drinking at the time (review to come over the weekend) was that with my glass I noticed more fruit flavors and with her glass I got more of the earthy flavors. It was an interesting experiment and one I will try again.
Go here for a peek at the Riedel Sommelier series of glasses and try this out the next time you’re drinking wine!
July 24th, 2007 at 9:33 am -
My problem tends to be that I stick my nose too far in and tilt the glass back at the same time, often ending up with wine all over the end of my nose!
July 26th, 2007 at 12:21 am -
It’s more complicated than that. Many years ago my wife and I were out wine tasting in Santa Barbara county. Everywhere we went we were disagreeing on the wines. I finally realized what was going on and asked to swap glasses - and the light came on. Now mind you, we were tasting from identical glasses… but I have a tendency to swirl a lot and she swirls very little. The way we handled the wine made a profound difference….
July 29th, 2007 at 9:04 pm -
Sonadora, I’m with you!! I think I spend more time smelling than drinking! el jefe, you bring up a very interesting point. I have the tendency to swirl all the time thinking the wine will get better with air. Great comments!