Are wine glasses really important?

It is a popular belief that the glass in which you serve a fine wine is almost as important to your enjoyment of 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 does taste better if drunk from the right glass.

So how do we tell which glasses are the best to use? With so many different glasses out there it’s difficult to tell which ones will be the best. Most people agree that a specially dseigned glass is needed for some types of wine. The most obvious example of this is the tall, thin champagne flutes which are designed to retain the ‘fizziness’ in sparkling wines by reducing the surface area at the top. A serious wine buff 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 take this theory a lot further. Real wine geeks claim 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 especially to enhance the experience of drinking it. No one has taken this further than Austrian wine glass manufacturer Riedel, the company that first came up with the idea. They actually produce different 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 out of, 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 think we ‘taste’ when we drink wine is in fact a combination of its smell and the 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 mostly 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, it’s just generally more satisfying to drink from a crystal glass!

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