Knowing Which Wine Glasses to Use

4 of 9 in Series: The Essentials of Serving and Storing Wine

You can appreciate a wine’s aroma and flavor complexities much more out of a fine wine glass. Wine glasses come in all shapes and sizes. If you’re just drinking wine as refreshment with your meal, the glass you use probably doesn’t matter too much.

But if you have a good wine, a special occasion, friends who want to talk about the wine with you, or the boss for dinner, stemware (glasses with stems) is called for. And it’s not just a question of etiquette and status: Good wine tastes better out of good glasses. Really.

Good wine glasses are always clear. Those pretty pink or green glasses may look nice in your china cabinet, but they interfere with your ability to distinguish the true colors of the wine. You can find decent everyday wine glasses for as little as $3 a glass in wine shops and home furnishing stores.

Wine glass sizes and shapes

Believe it or not, the taste of a wine changes when you drink the wine out of different types of glasses. Three aspects of a glass are important: its size, its shape, and the thickness of the glass.

Size

For dry red and white wine, small glasses are all wrong. You just can’t swirl the wine around in those little glasses without spilling it, which makes appreciating the aroma of the wine almost impossible. Small glasses can work adequately only for sherry or dessert wines, which have strong aromas to begin with and are generally consumed in smaller quantities than table wines.

Matching glass size to wine works like this:

Glasses for red wines should hold a minimum of 12 ounces; many of the best glasses have capacities ranging from 16 to 24 ounces, or more.
For white wines, 10 to 12 ounces should be the minimum capacity.
For sparkling wines, an 8 to 12 ounce capacity is fine.

Thickness and shape

Stemware made of very thin, fine crystal costs a lot more than normal glasses. That’s one reason why many people don’t use it, and why some people do. The better reason for using fine crystal is that the wine tastes better out of it. The shape of the bowl also matters. Some wine glasses have very round bowls, while others have more elongated, somewhat narrower bowls. Try your favorite wines at home using glasses of different shapes, just to see which glass works best for that wine.

An oval-shaped bowl that is narrow at its mouth is ideal for many red wines, such as Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignons, Merlots, Chiantis, and Zinfandels. On the other hand, some red wines, such as Burgundies, Pinot Noirs, and Barolos, are best appreciated in wider-bowled, apple-shaped glasses. Which shape and size works best for which wine has to do with issues such as how the glass’s shape controls the flow of wine onto your tongue.

The Bordeaux glass (left) and the Burgundy glass.

Sparkling wine: tulips, flutes, and trumpets

You thought that a tulip was a flower and a flute was a musical instrument? Well, they also happen to be types of glasses designed for use with sparkling wine.

The tulip is the ideally shaped glass for Champagne and other sparkling wines . It is tall, elongated, and narrower at the rim than in the middle of the bowl. This shape helps hold the bubbles in the wine longer, not allowing them to escape freely.
The flute is another good sparkling wine glass; but it is less ideal than the tulip because it does not narrow at the mouth.
The trumpet actually widens at the mouth, making it less suitable for sparkling wine but very elegant looking. Another drawback of the trumpet glass is that, depending on the design, the wine can actually fill the whole stem, which means the wine warms up from the heat of your hand as you hold the stem.

Credit: © Akira Chiwaki
Glasses for sparkling wine (from left): tulip, flute, trumpet.