Do wine glasses matter? Update!

From our gorgeous friend Erin of ACME Fine Wines and the soon to be released Hearty Splash, this update to yesterday’s question:

“The good folks who have been running Riedel (rhymes with needle, sharp like glass) for 350 years have spent an awful lot of time and research proving that yes, different shapes of glasses do make wines taste and smell differently.

Those bulbous, balloony glasses allow Pinot Noir’s delicate aromas to waft up, but the tapered, comparatively smaller opening at the top of the glass help keep those capricious aromas from floating away.

By contrast, the narrower glasses honestly do streamline the flavors and aromas of a wine like riesling, and shoot them right to the parts of your nose and mouth that will pick them up most appropriately. BUT~ that’s for folks who are looking to identify every distinct component of a wine, nothing you would do while eating dinner with friends (talk about being anti-social).

Fancy glasses can elevate an evening, but unless you’re training to be a master sommelier or are rolling out the red carpet for a special affair, use whichever glasses you like.”

Isn’t Erin the smartest?

And when I finally get that web site of hers up and running, I’ll point you to her for this kind of advice.

Wine questions, answered.

All the books have been claimed!
I’ll follow up with those of you that forgot your home addresses this week.
Thanks for sending me your questions!

This question showed up several times, so I’ll just hit it up first.

Question

What’s the deal with the different glasses for different kinds of wines/beverages?
Do they really make a difference?

Answer

The deal is part marketing, part truth. They do make a difference, but only to a point.

1. If you can’t afford to break the glasses, don’t buy them. I break roughly twelve wine glasses a year, so if they’re $80 each, I can’t afford that. You are probably more careful than I am, so pick the price you can commit to wine glasses and work from there.

2. I like my wine glasses to have big bowls. No matter the shape of the wine glass, the mouth should be smaller than the bowl at the widest point. This keeps the aroma in the glass. You can maximize the flavor of wine by aerating it. (Aerating: Swirling it in the glass.) If the glass is too small to swirl your wine in, you might miss out on some more nuanced flavors.

Aerating wine isn’t just for weinerheads, we can all learn from a little swirling ourselves (more on this later this week).

3. You really don’t need to buy smaller glasses for white wines and larger glasses for red wines. Since both kinds of wines do better after swirling, from a factual perspective, it’s perfectly fine to serve both colors in the same glass. However from an aesthetic perspective, I prefer smaller wine glasses for white wines – in my mind, the smaller glasses make white wines taste a little better. Again, this is only in my mind.

3. My personal preference is for clean, clear glasses that aren’t etched or colored. That way you can really see what you’re tasting. Crystal glasses are a little fancier than regular glasses, but you don’t really need them. We have a set of crystal glasses for dinner parties and special occasions linked to below.

4. As well, I like to have a stem on a wine glass. The stem does two things, you can hold the glass without warming your wine too much and it allows you to swirl your wine easier.

5. I also think it’s worth the storage space to keep champagne glasses on hand. The narrower bowl lets you hold the glass and not warm the wine. As well, by having a smaller surface area, it keeps the bubbles going a little longer.

Our dinner party glasses?
For white wine, I love my Spiegelau White Wine glasses.
For red, I love my Spiegelau Burgundy Glasses.

I try to be oh, so careful with these glasses, but that doesn’t stop me from breaking them regularly. Sigh.

Our everyday drinking glasses?
Wine glasses from Target or Ikea. Same goes for the champagne flutes. Champagne is celebratory no matter the quality of the glass.

Personally, I love those tiny tumblers that old Italian men drink out of. I’m fancy like that.

Friday linkery

My latest Serious Eats article is live. It’s about hosting a vegetarian dinner party.
It’s tasty.

My email giveaway is collecting some awesome questions. I’m following up with individual question askers over the weekend and sending books out next week. There are still two books left if you have an embarrassing wine question to email me. Yay Wiley!

Big cool company cheers to Annie’s Organic Snacks. They’re partnering with Farm to School, a nonprofit that connects schools with local farms to get those kiddos local, healthy food through their Root4Kids initiative. I know this because of their creative sponsorship of the Mighty Summit. And any effort that can get Nora Lea and Dottie to enjoy vegetables is all right with me.

Just a few cool lady cheers to new friends Tara Austen Weaver, Danielle Henderson and Alli Worthington.

Happy Friday!

California Wine for Dummies Giveaway

This is an email giveaway.

Email me your most embarrassing wine question.
Email me something that you’re ashamed you don’t know.
Email me at hjAThelenjaneDOTcom with “wine for dummies” in the subject line.
Email me your address in the body of the email.

You can ask about the price of wine, about labels, about laws, about what tastes good, heck, email me about what’s the big deal about wine, anyway.
Wine can be a complicated beverage and I’d love to make it easier.

I will take my favorite ten questions, publish the answers and questions anonymously on the site and send you a copy of California Wine for Dummies.

You have a really good chance of getting a free book, is all I’m saying.
Sound good?

And if you care about this kind of thing, the rest of the useful sponsor items left from the Mighty Summit were packed up to donate to the Napa Emergency Womens Shelter.

How to Saber a Bottle of Wine

It’s confusing to me, that it’s not common knowledge that people want to help each other reach their goals. Reality shows, and heck, American culture, often promote the individual’s success without acknowledging the role played by other humans.

We’re here to help one another get there.

The past year’s work culminated in a retreat called the Mighty Summit. It was such a treat to facilitate this retreat/conference/camp/gathering.

Unknown to me at the beginning of the weekend, both Margaret Stewart of YouTube and Fountly and Leah from A Girl and a Boy had items on their life lists that had to do with opening champagne. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was helping them cross that off.

Thanks to the wines of Roederer Estate, I held a sabering clinic, where I demonstrated the technique for chopping the top off of a bottle of wine with a knife.