Wine Glasses

If you enjoy wine tasting and drinking fine wines, then having the right stemware is as important as the wines with which you stock your cellar.

The serious enthusiast would no more likely drink fine red wine from a chardonnay glass than to drink Two Buck Chuck!

The three components of a wine glass are the bowl, the stem and the foot. Bowl size and shape are crucial to the perception of bouquet and flavor. The stem is also important since you want to hold a wine glass by its stem in order to maintain the wine’s temperature.

Wine Glass Materials and Manufacturing Techniques

A fine wine glass should be made with lead crystal, which has a high index of refraction to enhance the visual effect of the wine when holding the glass up to a light.

The thickness of the lip is another measure of the quality of a wine glass. If the glass is blown, it will have a thinner lip than one that is cut or fused.

Blown glass offers the finest in stemware for wine tasting and drinking, with the crème de le crème hand blown crystal wine glasses selling for $100 USD or more. Machine blown stemware is more moderately priced and offers close to the same quality, if less prestige, for as little as $10 to $60 USD.

A high quality wine glass is made of lead crystal or crystal and the shape and size of the bowl is designed to enhance the particular varietal being poured.

Bowl Size and Shape

Size and shape are determined by the varietal to be consumed and the specific characteristics to be emphasized. A larger, wider bowl size is desirable for heavier reds and smaller, narrower bowls are typically to pour whites. Fluted glasses are reserved for sparkling wines and Champagnes.

Glassmakers and vintners have spent centuries to perfect the shape of a wine glass for a given varietal and each maker will claim that theirs delivers wine to the right part of the palette more effectively than the next.

And, while the ability of a correctly shaped bowl definitely focuses the bouquet, it is less likely that to have any real benefit in “targeting” the taste buds and you can assume this is mostly, if not entirely, marketing hype!

A wine glass should never have an opening that is wider than the widest part of its bowl; to do so would let the aroma escape the glass.

Rarely would you see a connoisseur drink wine from a frosted or colored wine glass since you would not do anything to alter the distinct color and clarity of a fine wine, which are important characteristics by which a the quality of the wine is determined.

Notable makers of the highest quality crystal wine glasses include:

Riedel – perhaps the best known maker of quality wine glasses, this Austrian glassmaker has several lines of wine glass stemware, ranging from $10 or $20 at the low end to as much as $60 or $70 for glasses in Riedel’s high end lines.

Baccarat – maker of the some of the world’s finest crystal stemware, you can pay as much as $150 to $200 for Baccarat glasses, so save your pennies if you’re considering these as an addition to your collection!

More affordable, yet quality wine glass makers include:

Spiegelau - modeled after the Riedel stemware, but lesser quality crystal wine glasses in the range of $10 to $15.

Cantina Arredo – Italian maker offering high quality stemware wine glasses between $6 and $10 each.

Schott Zwiesel – about $15 each.

Villeroy & Bosch – run about $25 each.

Quality wine glasses will add to your enjoyment of a fine wine.