Clear advantage
Drinking wine out of a chunky beer mug is not going to enhance the experience, nor do a great deal for the overall ambience of your restaurant. That much is fairly obvious. But given a basic glass bowl with stem and stand attached, is there really much to choose between the thousands of varied styles of wine glass currently available? And, if so, why?
Wine magazine Decanter ran a blind tasting comparing six different wines all tasted in a variety of 22 different wine glasses with prices ranging from 60p to £45. "The results are astonishing, not to say sensational," they gasped. "There is no doubt about it: glasses can make or break a wine. Some enhance a wine's good points and make you enjoy it more, while others keep the wine dumb and neutral, or even enhance its bad qualities or destroy it."
Now, you could be forgiven for feeling a wee bit sceptical about Decanter's conclusions. After all, the magazine is for wine buffs, and the tasting was conducted by Masters of Wine, whose rarefied palates operate on a rather higher plane than those of the rest of us. When it comes to good wine the proof is in the pudding: only when you have tried for yourself can you appreciate just how important the size, shape and style of the glass can be. And the good news is: it doesn't have to cost the earth.
A large part of our enjoyment of wine lies in the bouquet. On the nose one can pick up a whole spectrum of aromas and nuances that are completely lost on the tongue. Our sense of smell dominates our sense of taste, which can only distinguish between salt, sweet, acid and bitter flavours. Try drinking wine through a straw and you'll get the idea. For a fine red wine to release the full complexity of its bouquet it needs space to breathe - a process brought on by gently swirling it in the glass. Hence the need for a relatively large glass of, say, 12oz or more - the old Paris goblet, by comparison, is 6oz or 8oz - that is big enough so that a reasonable quantity of wine would fill a third of the glass. White wines glasses have always been smaller to keep the wine cool, because less is poured out at a time, but here, too, sizes have tended to be a little mean. The stem should be tall enough to avoid warming the wine with one's hands.
The Austrian glass manufacturer Riedel has done a lot of research into how the shape of the glass determines the way the wine flows into the mouth and which part of the tongue it hits first. For example, the lip of its top-of-the-range Burgundy glass curves out slightly to send the wine straight to the tip of the tongue, the part that registers sweetness. Of course, the full taste follows straight on as the wine flows over the whole tongue, but according to Riedel it is that first impression from the initial point of contact that helps emphasise the fruit in the Pinot Noir. Out of its research was born the hand-blown Sommelier range of 33 glasses - one for every grape variety, though, with an average retail price of £30, way beyond the means of most of us. Riedel's UK importer Michael Johnson is quick to point out that these are not really designed for the restaurant, where its biggest-selling line is Vinum.
The best overall shape for dry wine is like a tulip, with an ample bowl and gently tapering sides - the same as for the ISO glass designed specifically for wine tasting, only bigger. The height and slightly conical shape allow the wine in the glass to be swirled round without losing any of the bouquet or, indeed, the wine itself. Such glasses are widely available. There's a 14oz glass in Schott's popular Excelsior range at £5.18, a 12oz from Verra à Vin's Château range at £2.18, another 12oz from Bowman Weaver Walker's Oenologue range at £3.58, a hand-blown version at £4.17 from Nazeing Glass in their Connaught range (all prices are excluding VAT), and an attractive offering from Waterford from the Marquis range in its Vintage Collection. Most suppliers offer quantity discounts, and with hand-blown glass it's well worth enquiring about seconds, as the flaws in the glass are often barely discernible. When it comes to sparkling wines, flutes are much better than those Champagne saucers supposedly modelled on Marie Antoinette's left breast, which are best kept for Babycham.
The style of glass also affects the taste, or rather the perception of taste. Glass should be crystal-clear and smooth to show off the clarity and depth of colour in a wine, which is why coloured glass or cut crystal is best avoided. Thin glass, either top-quality machine-made or hand-blown, is beautiful and allows you to warm red wines in your hands, though clearly there has to be a trade-off in the restaurant between quality and the risk of breakage. Another way to tell the pedigree of a glass is by its rim. A fine, lead-crystal glass should disappear as you drink from it, leaving nothing between the wine and your lips - the most sensitive part of your body - whereas a fat, "beaded" rim like the Paris goblet says "cheap, pub glass" loud and clear.
Choosing the right glasses depends on the restaurant, its clientele, and the quality of the wines on the list. If the table setting aspires to a sense of opulence, wine glasses of a generous size in gleaming lead-crystal can only enhance the feeling. And the converse is true: cheap, mass-produced glass ruins the effect of glittering cutlery on a swathe of starched linen. "Glasses are part of the show, part of the sensual pleasure of dining out," says Stephen Pollock-Hill of Nazeing Glass, which supplies Granada's Heritage chain among others. Whether large, fine glasses encourage people to order more expensive wines is hard to prove, though anecdotal evidence suggests it probably does. Having a set of better glasses for whenever someone asks for something special is one way of showing appreciation. According to Michael Johnson, who cites the River Café as an example, this is something that's beginning to catch on.
Apart from the expense, the main reason not to trade up to better glasses is the feeling that they are too fragile. "This fear of breakages is exaggerated," says Roger Churchill of Schott Glass, "because when a glass shatters it's always spectacular." Clearly, it depends on the venue. Anything brittle is not going to last long at the crush bar in the theatre. Most suppliers can advise on glasses with strengthened stems or made of toughened glass, as well as the correct dishwasher settings and where to find the right racks. They all say glasses should be stored upright to protect the rims and stop the build-up of bacteria.
