Right Glass Matters

Most of us get by with one set of wine glasses for everything from Chardonnay to Cabernet. Not serious wine people. Connoisseurs demand different glasses for different wines. Coke tastes the same in a Baccarat tumbler or a Styrofoam cup, but the taste of wine, especially good and great wine, can be dramatically altered by the shape of a glass.

“Each wine has different characteristics, everything from its aroma to its acidity to its tannins, fruits and phenols,” says Margaret Stern, spokeswoman for Riedel Crystal of Austria, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of stemware. “Someone once said there were 3,000 elements in a wine. Therefore, if you serve all wines out of one standard glass, you’re not maximizing qualities that are in the wine.”

There’s no need to purchase dozens of different glasses, although you certainly could. Riedel’s Sommelier line, for example, features about 30 highly specified wine glasses. A few qualities, however, are essential. Glasses should be clear, in order to appreciate the color of a wine. And their stems should be long enough to hold. You don’t want to cup the bowl with your hand unless you are intentionally trying to warm a wine.

Here are four basic wine glasses. We asked Chris Angulo, wine steward at the Water Grill restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, to give us the lowdown on each one.

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The idea behind this glass is that you don’t want to lose the sparkle in the wine. The tight cylindrical shape maximizes the contact of the wine to the interior surface of the glass and consequently the number of bubbles, which flow upward in a pleasing column, all the better to appreciate the shape of the individual bubbles, a favorite activity of wine aficionados.

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The principal wines one would drink in this glass, cabernet sauvignon and merlot, need quite a bit of air to be best appreciated. The shape of this glass, widest at the center, ensures that much of the wine’s surface is exposed to air. In addition, the narrowing at the top centers aromas and allows the wine to move up the glass when swirled without spilling over.

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Perfect for pinot noir, the burgundy glass directs the flow of the wine to the tip of the tongue, the sweet zone. This is important because traditionally, pinot noir is high in acidity. By playing up the natural sweetness, the wine becomes more balanced.

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Typically slightly smaller than the bordeaux glass, the white wine glass works especially well with chardonnays, viogniers and roussanes. It directs the wine to the center of the tongue, resulting in a good balance of fruitiness and acidity. The gentle narrowing of the mouth focuses aromas.

Leslee Komaiko