Choosing Glassware for Wine

There are a huge range of wine glassware styles available, ranging from very inexpensive and simple to hand blown and elegant. Just what kind of a difference does the glassware make on a wine's enjoyment?

First, there are many caveats here. If you don't have spare money, it doesn't matter what glass you drink out of. A glass of any kind is better than a paper cup or a thick coffee mug. Also, if you're the type that buys a bottle to show the name off to friends, vs a bottle you actually enjoy, then you'll just buy whatever is most expensive for the same reason :)

But for most of us, we're looking for a balance of budget cost and bang-for-the-buck. Do those more expensive glasses REALLY change how a wine tastes? How could it matter?

I've done many tests with different glassware, including many tests with new wine drinkers.

The answer is that it DOES make a difference - sometimes a big difference. The reason is that over many years, the glassmakers have experimented with different thicknesses of glass, different openness of the inner bowl, and different narrowness of the opening at the top. Remember, the vast majority of your "taste" is really your sense of smell. Your tongue can only taste bitter, salty, sweet and sour. Everything else - the gentle strawberry, the grassiness, the butter - is coming from your nose.

So how your nose connects with those wine aromas is THE most critical part of drinking a wine. Take that $8.99 Chardonnay you grabbed at the local wine shop. If you glug it from a straight water glass, you might think "Mmmmm. Yellow." You might not get any flavors at all. But if you toss the exact same wine into say a Riedel Chardonnay glass, you suddenly will smell the melon, the butter, the vanilla, the crisp nuttiness. All those flavors you lost before will now be revealed.

So on one hand, the higher end glasses are *great* for those $100/bottle rare wines that you savor. On the other hand, if you put even the *best buy* wines into these high end glasses, you will realize that they are far better than you ever imagined. What a treat, to get great flavors and complexities for only $8.99. In essence you pay once for the glass, and it makes every wine you buy taste far better.

Riedel did all of the work to figure out which glass shapes worked best for which grape types. Different aromas as you might imagine have different strengths and need glassware shaped to help your nose smell them. Once those shapes were discovered, though, other glassmakers lept right on the bandwagon and began cranking out similar but cheaper versions.

If you line up the various versions of glassware side by side - say all of the Chardonnay glasses - can you taste a difference? Well first, ALL make the Chardonnay wines taste far better than a water glass would. So any of them is a huge improvement. Sure, you might see subtle differences as you move up the line. The buttery flavor gets a smidgen more intense. The nuttiness is a bit more pronounced. It's up to your budget, though, to say that you really want to pay $40 extra for that tiny improvement. For some people, that's throwaway money that isn't worth worrying about. For others, that's an important decision to make.

I personally wouldn't go with giant sets of six to start with, and I wouldn't go with one of every possible type. Instead, think honestly about the wines you drink every month. Choose your two favorite types. Now get 2 glasses in those two styles. Do your own tastings, and see for yourself if it makes a difference that you care about. At this point you've already taken care of your favorite wine styles and have made drinking them into a more special event. If you entertain, have your guests drink from normal wine glasses and then invite them to try a taste from the special glasses to see if they sense a difference. There's no sense getting extra glasses for guests if they don't seem to care :)

You may find that you love these new glasses immensely and that suddenly your $9.99 bottles of wine are tasting like $20 bottles of wine. Meaning every bottle you buy, you're in essence saving $10. The glassware can pay for itself rather quickly if you think of it like that. In that case, begin to branch out, and get pairs of glasses for the other wines you tend to enjoy.

In the end, it comes down to how you, personally, enjoy the wine you drink. Wine drinking is a VERY personal experience. I can't tell you what to drink or how to drink it - and neither can anyone else. If your taste buds tell you that White Zinfandel with ice cubes from a big glass tastes best, then go with it. Life is too short to twist yourself in a knot to get your mouth to suit another person's declaration. Drink what you like, drink it how you like it, but be open to experimentation just in case there is an option that pleases you even better.

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