Does wine really taste better out of an expensive glass?
It is a popular belief that the glass in which you serve a fine wine is almost as important to how much you enjoy the drink as the wine itself. The shape, colour and fabric of wine glasses are all supposed to influence the way you appreciate the flavour and aroma of a wine. Whether there is really any truth to this or not remains to be seen but there are actually some convincing arguments that a wine really does taste better if drunk from the right glass.
So how do we know which glasses are the best to use? With so many different designs out there it’s hard to know which ones will be the best. Most people agree that a specially shaped glass is required for certain types of wine. The most obvious example of this is tall, thin flute-shaped glasses for champagne which are designed to retain the ‘fizziness’ in sparkling wines by reducing the surface area at the top. A serious wine drinker will also use different glasses for red and white wines – a rounder, wider bowl for reds to allow more space for the wine to breathe, and a slightly smaller, tulip-shaped bowl to help keep whites cool.
But some people take this theory a lot further. Real wine geeks say the difference between wines runs a lot deeper than just the colour, and that for each different variety of wine there is a glass designed specifically to enhance the experience of drinking it. No one has pursued this further than Riedel, the Austrian wine glass manufacturer that came up with the idea. They produce customised glasses not only for different types of wine, but also for different varieties and vintages within each type – although not many people could afford to collect the whole set!
As for what the glass is made from, many people believe a fine wine tastes better if drunk from a crystal glass. This is not entirely true – although drinking from a lead crystal glass is generally considered to be more enjoyable. It’s actually less about flavour than aroma, the majority of what we ‘taste’ when we drink wine is actually a combination of its smell and the effect of the evaporated aromas in the mouth. Crystal wine glasses, due to their heightened lead content (for a glass to count as ‘Crystal’ in Europe it has to contain at least 24% lead) have a slightly rougher surface than glass, which helps to release the aroma better by causing friction as the wine moves inside the glass.
Other than this, the differences are almost entirely aesthetic. A lead crystal glass is clearer and shows off the wine better, allowing real wine tasters to examine its ‘legs’ more easily. It’s also a lot heavier than glass – again because of the high lead content – sparkles more and makes that nice ringing sound when you tap it – science aside, crystal glasses are just generally more satisfying to drink from!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
