It's possible to get pretty crazy about stemware and other wine apparatus. I have a friend who has no less than ten distinct shapes of Riedel stems (in sets of 16, I should add) and he often gripes that if he just had one more a particular wine would taste even better (I think there are more than 30 shapes in the Sommelier series -- that's the best of the Riedel lines -- alone). And for most of history people enjoyed fine wine just fine without so many specialized glasses. Still, if you're going to spend considerable sums of money on wine it makes sense to take reasonable steps to get the most out of that wine. This includes not only using good and appropriate stemware (and cleaning it properly -- my major pet peeve about how most of my friends handle their stemware) but also serving wine at the right temperature, and before that storing it properly and decanting if necessary. I've participated in tastings where the same wine was served in four different glasses and it did indeed display different characteristics in each. I wouldn't say it tasted like four different wines, but there are certainly better and worse glasses for any given wine. Whatever kind of wine glasses you get, modern wine thinking (with which I agree) holds that they should be 1) plain, 2) colorless, 3) tulip-shaped, 4) thin lipped, and 5) crystal. The basic reasons are 1&2) a glass with facets or etchings, or a colored glass, stifles the visual appreciation of wine, 3) the tulip (a/k/a egg) shape, meaning that the glass widens into a bowl at the stem and then tapers back inwards towards the lip, serves to concentrate and collect a wine's bouquet, which is the most important element of perceiving wine's subtleties, 4) a thin, smooth lip creates a narrow stream of wine that hits the most sensitive areas of the tongue (really), 5) crystal in addition to being aesthetically preferable to glass has a rougher surface than glass and therefore helps wine release its aromas as you swirl and sip (this is all at the microscopic level -- of course crystal appears perfectly smooth to the naked eye). Me, I get by primarily with two sets of Spiegelau glasses -- the Bordeaux and Burgundy (from the largest sized series) -- which are incredibly cheap (maybe ů per stem) given their quality. (I'm seeing mostly these in the best restaurants. The Riedel Sommeliers are too expensive and fragile for restaurant use and the lower level Riedels aren't as good as Spiegelau.) I use the Bordeaux glasses (the smaller of the two) for white wines too. Traditional thinking is that the white wine glass should be small, in order to prevent the rapid warming that would occur in a vessel with more surface area. But I think a lot of people are beginning to think that the larger glasses allow for better appreciation of the wine. As long as you hold the glass by the stem instead of cupping it in your hand (another pet peeve, though there are exceptions like brandy which are supposed to be warmed in the hand which is why brandy snifters have only vestigial stems) the wine won't get too warm too quickly. I've got some other glasses around too. The "Paris goblet" which is your basic almost-spherical wine glass, works well enough for almost any wine. If I have a party (which I do maybe twice a decade), I put those out because it's silly to use massive connoisseur stems in a walking-around-and-sipping environment (though, ironically, my Paris goblets are significantly more expensive than my Spiegelaus, probably by a factor of 10, because they're Baccarat Perfection -- wedding gift). I have some of the traditional small white wine glasses that I find work very well as dessert wine glasses. There are glasses here and there taking up space in my cabinet that I bought in various misguided efforts to build a collection -- I never use them and really should get rid of most. A few Champagne flutes round out the inventory at the Shaw/Shapiro household. For good Champagne, though, I like to use the small white wine glasses. Flutes don't do much for the bouquet. I should probably get some brandy snifters but I don't drink enough brandy for that to be a priority. For the occasional digestif a regular glass is fine. Unfortunately, many of us didn't know as much about wine when we got married as we do now, and we picked our wedding patterns for appearance rather than oenological enjoyment. But given how cheap the Spiegelaus are, it's an easy problem to correct. One warning, though: Big stems take up more cabinet space than you can easily imagine. It's hard even to find a shelf tall enough. (Edited by Fat Guy at 2:45 am on July 22, 2001) ----- Steven A. Shaw www.fat-guy.com
