How to Choose the Right Wine Glass

Riedel glassware and decanter—Riedel Glass produces different shaped glasses for different wine grapes and for different regions.

“Cabernet“, “Bordeaux” and “Burgundy” styles among others. The Riedel family has been making glass for 11 generations and over 300 years (since 1756).

https://www.iwawine.com/glassware/wine-glassware-by-brand/riedel

The Shape of Things

Figuring out which wine glass to use is only slightly less complicated than explaining quantum physics, only without the quarks. Fear not, I am here to help.

Wine glasses are your friend.

I will first help by reminding you that you can drink wine out of your hand. Forgot about that, didn’t you?

I’ve done it. It’s a little messy, so I only recommend the hand technique for outdoor use. Most of the time, you do have a bottle after all.

However, I’m guessing you would just as soon have a glass, although some of you may enjoy a nice Cabernet Blanc out of a Dixie Cup.

Wine experts’ obsession with wine glasses (and goblets and bowls and bags and God knows what) has produced a remarkable variety of shapes, sizes and materials to drink wine from.

Also, rules. Oh my goodness, the rules.

Somehow, choosing which glass to use for which wine has managed to turn something that’s supposed to be fun into another status symbol (which is to say, a rich source of potential embarrassment) as well as another source of personal stress.

Not to mention expense.

Wine glasses are also, or at least can be, works of sometimes profound art and some considerable science.

The science of wine glasses

In 2015, a Japanese medical group used a special camera to record images of ethanol vapors in different glasses. In their study, the research group showed how different glass shapes affected the density and position of vapors at the openings of different glasses.—-Wine Folly. www.winefolly.co

Riedel Glass, which is a very old glass company dating back to 1756 in Bohemia, first introduced the idea of grape specific wine glass in 1986.

Georg J. Riedel, 10th generation, evolved his father's research when he introduced RIEDEL Sensory Workshops as a method of testing and refining their products with the help of master sommeliers and winemakers. Georg introduced the world's first collection of grape varietal specific glassware in 1986, Vinum. —from https://www.riedel.com/en-us/enjoywine/the-riedel-basics/grape-varietal-specific-vs-wine-friendly-glassware

Although the difference in concentrations of ethanol and various aromatics can be measured by science, most people won’t be able to tell the difference in real life. If you’ve trained for years it may make a difference.

It is brilliant marketing. It’s just like sliced bread only, you know, sliced glasses.

Riedel glasses (or Waterford Crystal) are as much art as aroma.

That said, the shape of the glass does shape what you experience in a given wine in at least two ways. First, tapering in at the top of a glass concentrates the aromatics and makes them more accessible to your palate. Second, and much more powerful to me, psychologically.

I cover that part in my book, “The Secret Life of Wine” in the chapter called “You can’t sell Wine in a Hat.” You can check it out here if you are so moved:

Look inside my book at Amazon

I was an owner and President of a winery that ran a focus group where we put the same wine in different shaped containers. As it happens, the group gave totally different quality ratings and totally different prices to each sample depending on the specific container it was in— a wine glass, a water glass, a milk carton, a decanter and so on.

Even though the wine was exactly the same.

So, is that a $2 wine or a $200 wine? Well, it turns out, that depends on what it’s in.

https://winefolly.com/tutorial/the-importance-of-a-proper-wine-glass

The Art of Wine Glasses

Wine Glasses that Change Color

Recent evidence suggests that the Roman craftsmen who created the Lycurgus Cup, a glass drinking goblet, used nanotechnology to cause the goblet to change color under different lighting.

https://phys.org/news/2013-08-goblet-ancient-romans-nanotechnology.html

Goblets like the one in the photo above are made of “dichroic glass” — they change color depending which direction the light is coming from. Excellent for fancy parties.

Lycurgus was a King who drank too much, tried to rape his mother, and chopped up his son thinking he was a piece of Ivy, which is sacred to Dionysus, the Greek God of Wine.

Dionysus was not amused.

And no, I don’t know how you get so drunk you can’t tell your son from a piece of ivy but that’s what the story says.

At any rate, that’s his cup in the photo above. As you can see the old King is tangled up in grape vines.

Probably at the exact moment he’s thinking he should have stuck to bottled water.

“The goblet was created approximately 1,600 years ago, using a process whereby very tiny gold and silver particles were embedded in the glass. In normal lighting, the glass appears to have a jade background. When lit from behind, however, the green parts suddenly look ruby red.

Researchers speculate that the Romans simply ground the metal particles until it would take a thousand of them to match the size of single sand grain, then mixed them in with the hot liquid glass. But that wasn't the end of the story: the Romans created a goblet such as the Lycurgus Cup, by carving it from a single block. That means they also understood that different thicknesses of the glass would exhibit different coloring as well.” — Bob Yirka, from www.phys.org

Hand Blown Murano Glass. Murano is world famous for its glass blowing techniques— https://www.carolinadew.com/listing/723290335/italian-venetian-murano-blue-wine

Giving Form to Breath

The earliest evidence of glassblowing comes from a collection of waste from a glass shop, including fragments of glass tubes, glass rods and tiny blown bottles, which was dumped in a mikvah, a ritual bath in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, dated from 37 to 4 BC glass.—Wikipeida “glass blowing” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassblowing

Glass Blower shaping a wine glass by hand.

Glass blowing is as much an art to watch as it is to do.

That furnace they are sticking rods into gets up to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. I burn myself on the toaster oven. I shall probably not become a glass blower anytime soon.

However, when I lived in New York City I would drive over into Pennsylvania to a little glass blowing shop north of Philadelphia just to watch. I was looking for the latest dragons, sailing ships, and unicorns as well as more practical items like wine glasses, jars and bowls.

Glass blowing is a kind of miracle. You apply fire to sand and, low and behold, the sand turns to liquid.

Sounds like a miracle to me. Fire and sand equal glass.

More than that, with the help of a tube, you blow your own breath into the really hot gooey liquid and your breath makes a shape. More miracles.

If you are a great glass blower, like Dale Chihuly and his team (see video below), you can create shapes that have never been created in glass before. Shapes that haven’t even been imagined before.

The best wine glasses are still hand blown. Factories can produce more quantity but machines can’t create. They just reproduce what’s already been created. It combines art and science in uniquely practical way.

When I was working at Thanksgiving Coffee Company in Mendocino County, California, I would drive over to the Glass Fire Gallery 10 minutes away. You can see one of their jellyfish chandeliers in the photo below.

An amazing gallery of the imagination. You can check it out on their website: http://glassfiregallery.com/products_2.html

The Art of Wine and Glass Together

Wine is nothing if not a figment of our imagination.

The tastes and smells we experience are just neurons discharging electrical sparks. It’s our brain that makes the tastes and smells and colors. And, which tastes or smells or colors we get are determined by the shape of the container the wine is put into. Our experience of a nice Chianti in a gracefully soaring hand blown glass is not the same as that Chianti when it is in a plastic picnic cup.

Choosing a wine glass can be overwhelming if you worry too much about the rules. But, I’ve given you the rules just in case.

If you are entertaining, then do as you wish. You are creating art and that is a different matter.

But, if you’re seriously interested in the experience of wine itself, just try the same wine in two or three different containers. Try it under two or three different lighting conditions. Try to separate the taste of the wine from all the outside influences that are not-wine.

See what happens.

A rule is just a rule. It’s not physics or God either one.

And in the end, well, Dixie Cups are still just dixie cups.