What kind of glass should wine be served in? How much money you want to spend is really what it comes down to. I tend to use a big round shaped goblet that will hold a fair amount of wine. How much money...
How much money you want to spend is really what it comes down to. I tend to use a big round shaped goblet that will hold a fair amount of wine. Your wine glasses really should only hold a maximum of six ounces. I see a lot of people buying the 22-ounce wine glasses. I have several of them but I only put about six ounces in them. The big globe is designed to aerate the wine. When you swirl the wine in the glass it will capture all those aromas so you can smell the wine and therefore helps with your taste. The big thing about wine glasses is that they should always be clear. In other words, they shouldn't have any color or tint to the glass. I don't like crystal wine glasses. They look gorgeous, but you can't see the color of the wine.
You don't have to spend a lot of money on wine glasses. The glasses I use for tastings are about $2 a glass. If you really want to spend the money, we are talking upwards of $120-$150 per glass.
Does it make a difference? Yes, it makes a huge difference. Two years ago, Reidel did a glassware tasting here in Austin and we started off with a cheap wineglass like what you would find in a typical restaurant. There is really nothing wrong with the glass. We poured red wine into it and tasted it. We wrote down our note saying what we thought the wine was. Then, we took that same wine and poured it into one of the their red wine glasses. The wine smelled completely different and tasted completely different and the reason why is that the wine glass itself is designed to capture the aromas a certain way, but more importantly when you drink you have to tilt the glass back a certain amount. Their glasses were designed so that the wine hit your palate at the exact spot it should. Then we tried the red wine in their chardonnay glasses and once again it tasted completely different. It was the most amazing exercise I have ever seen in my life. The glass does make a difference. The question is how much you are willing to spend on the glass.
The big question is how serious you are when it comes to this and you don't have to be at all. I travel with my own wine glasses now, which is the weirdest thing in the world, but I am so used to using certain glasses and I know how the wine is going to hit my palate. So, I carry my own when I go to wine tastings. I have become very adamant over the last year and half about wine glasses, in how I wash them, and how I handle my glasses - to me it makes a difference. Wine tasting is what I do professionally. I can go to a friends house and they will hand me a wine glass and I will smell it and say you had Chinese food last night because the dishes were all washed together. I am pretty sensitive on that now.
If you really want to get into it you can spend hundreds of dollars on wine glasses. You can definitely get sets of wine glasses for $15-$20 that will do the job no problem and you will be happy with them. But I am a firm believer that if you really want to experience wine you need to have a clean glass. No matter what glass you use, make sure you wash it and handle it in a certain way and make sure the wine is good.
I have taught my girlfriend a lot about wine over the last year. She kind of took it for granted before. She went to a wine tasting event with me and said, "You've got issues when it comes to this." So I sat down and started to explain to her and she was like "oh! I understand". Now when she goes to wine tasting events with me she sometimes picks up defects or faults in the wines better than I do because her nose is better than mine.
