Why Your Wine Glass Matters

Does your wine glass matter? If you are savoring what you are drinking, it does. You can prove it to yourself by finding glasses of different shapes and sizes and sampling wine from the same bottle in each one of them. Be sure to carefully note the differences in flavors that emanate from the wine on your palate. Notice which hit first and which linger. Notice which glasses provide the most harmonious feeling and mood from the wine.

Wow, that sounds like a crock, doesn't it? It's not.

Let's consider why. The mammalian palate is essentially what we think of as the roof of our mouth. Since we taste in our mouths and smell with our noses, what will be really important to us in enjoying a liquid is to marry the taste and the smell. Well, that palate -- the roof of your mouth -- actually connects the nasal cavity, typically referred to as a nose, to the oral cavity, typically referred to as a mouth. So, in a wine glass (or whisky glass or beer glass or any other beverage container), what we really seek is a vessel that perfectly directs the liquid to the right parts of the oral-nasal connection in the right order. In addition, as the flavor and texture profiles of wine change with changes in temperature, we want a vessel that allows our wine to stay at the correct temperature or at least what each of us considers the most enjoyable temperature.

While we're on the subject of temperature, allow me to digress. While the rest of the world seems to do a far better job than we do, Americans as a group drink our white wine far too cold (it dulls the natural yet subtle flavors) and our red wine far too warm (the flavors are overwhelmed by the acidity and tannins). It's just science.

Science also tells us about our palate and tongue and why it's important to direct our beverage for full enjoyment. There are five basic tastes -- bitterness, sourness, sweetness, saltiness, and umami (often described as savory). Each has its own identity within the human taste mechanism topography. 

Bitterness is identified typically near the back palate. While some like bitterness in their wines, most people would consider a wine that is overly bitter to be undrinkable. So, the extent that a wine has natural bitterness, it needs to be directed away from the back palate.

We taste sourness nearly dead center from front to back, but near the sides of our tongue. This sourness causes us to pucker our mouths. In doing so, our mouths may water, diluting the other flavors in the wine.

Sweetness explodes on the front of your tongue and near the front of your palate. So, when drinking a sweet wine, you will get the full experience by directing the wine toward that area.

Saltiness, often expressed in wine as minerality, also hits near the front of the mouth, but more toward the sides. Wines having a primary feature of minerality (think Chablis, for example) are fully expressive when directed there.

Finally, umami or savory, does not actually have a home on the palate. What it has rather than a home is a place in time. Umami appears last and lingers. It's predominant in foods like mushrooms and bacon. Wines with long finishes (meaning that the flavor lasts on your palate for long periods of time) tend to have significant umami (by the way, umami is roughly translated from the Japanese as yummy), so the vessel in which they are served needs to lend itself to leaving the wine on the palate for a long time.

Returning finally to wines, we've somewhat neatly packaged how they need to be directed. So, turning the five basic flavors to wine terminology:

• Wines with residual sugar need to be directed more to the front of the tongue and palate to be fully expressive. Dessert wine glasses or typically much smaller forcing the wine first to the very tip.
• Wines with higher acidity also need to hit the tip of the tongue first, but to move to mid-palate more rapidly. This will highlight the fruit and calm the acidity. Cooler climate grapes such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir fall into this category.
• More tannic wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Nebbiolo need to be directed more mid-to-back-palate. For the most savory of them, a particularly large bowl in the glass will promote the natural physiological tendency for those wines to rest on the palate for longer periods of time allowing us to relish the finish.

Try it yourself if you have access to the glasses. Get yourself some bread or plain crackers as a palate cleanser. Grab a bottle of your favorite, "every day" wine. Taste it from each of a champagne flute, a snallish, wide-mouthed glass with a straight or out-flaring rim, a smallish, somewhat narrower-mouthed glass with an in-flaring rim, a large-bowled glass with each of a straight rim and an in-flaring rim. Cleanse your pallet with the crackers between each tasting.

Finally, use glasses with stems and hold the glasses by the stems. Your hands, even if they feel cold are near your resting body temperature. They will warm your wine above its perfect temperature. You're changing the wine and not in a good way.

Use stems.