First choose your glass - JR|publication date: Jan 31, 2007 Wine is drunk out of glasses rather than teacups or silver goblets because glass is inert, relatively thin and allows full appreciation of a wine';s appearance. The perfect wine glass has a stem and a bowl that goes in towards the rim, so that the aroma is caught within the glass for easy sniffing. It is also made of clear glass so that the wine';s colour, an important element in assessing and enjoying wine to the full, can be appreciated. Wine nuts also like to commune with their wine as physically closely as possible, which means that thin crystal is highly valued whereas thicker, patterned and cut glass are not. So that wine can be swirled without losing any liquid and so that there is space for the precious aroma or bouquet to collect in the bowl, the glass should ideally fill no more than half the available volume of the glass. Not filling up a glass is sensible not mean. A stem means that you can hold and swirl the glass without affecting the temperature of the wine with your own body temperature. There is no real need for a range of glasses of different sizes except that we tend to need smaller servings of sweet wines and fortified wines. It has always seemed unfair to me that white wines are conventionally served in smaller glasses than red wines because they need just as much head space. Tumblers may be used in earthy and aspiringly earthy Italian restaurants, but the thickness of the glass and the difficulty of swirling the wine around in them makes them pleasure-killers for wine enthusiasts. The almost spherical ';Paris goblet'; is one of the cheapest wine glasses available (four can be bought for the price of a bottle of very basic wine). It fulfils the criteria of having a stem and going in towards the rim, and is better than narrower ';tulip'; shapes, but the glass is too thick to provide intimate or luxurious contact with the wine. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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