How to Choose the Correct Wine Glass

Kathleen Lisson: Hi, I am Kathleen Lisson, certified specialist of wine and I am going to give you few hints and tips on how to use wine glasses the next time you're serving a special dinner or join a cocktail party.

Now, imagine you're ready to serve wine at your next dinner, but right before you set the table, see your strikes are hard. Which glasses doe you put on the table? There's a variety of wine glasses, I know you can drink wine out of every one of these glasses and they all go to your throat at the same time. There is a method to the madness of different wine glass shapes.

Let me tell you step-by-step which wine is preferred to go in which glass. So you'll have no fear whatsoever the next time you set your table for a great dinner with the food and wine pairing.

First, let's speak of red wines. Red wines are bigger, they have tannins, they open slower, sometimes you have to age them for years in the bottle. They have big flavors and they need a lot of air, put into them with a swirling, you put them into a decanter, they need more air than white wines.

So if you're going to serve red wine for dinner, the bigger the red wine, the more important this is. Red wines need a big area, surface area, so more air gets to them, and they need a big bowl like this. So when you swirl them, more wine can get contact with air.

So if you're serving red wine, look for a glass that has a big bottom on it.

This glass is also another good glass for red wines, because it does have not so much a big bottom as this traditional glass, but it does have a lot of volume in the glass, so you can definitely aerate the wine better.

Now if you're looking for white wines, you need a glass with a little more of a narrow opening. So this is a traditional wine glass. This will be good for white wines and red wines, but it will be good for white wines in that, the narrower the opening the better, because white wines, they don't need as much aeration as a big red wine does, but they have more delicate flavors.

You can definitely sometimes smell a red wine from like six inches away. You know the smells are coming out of that wine. I can smell these red wines now and I haven't even put my nose in the glass. But white wines, particularly the lighter wines, you're getting into sense of apricots and lemons like citrus. You want to get every single piece of that flavor from the wine into your nose. So when you're drinking it, you'll look for a narrower opening, so when you smell it, all those aromas are trapped inside the glass by the narrow opening, and they're not allowed to dissipate into the surrounding table area, as they would be if there was a wide opening.

Now when we think of sparkling wines, I have a great sparkling wine here. This is from Clinton Vineyards, it's the Peach Gala. This is a dryer sparkling wine, and it would go in a wine flute like this. It's straight up, it has a narrow opening, so I can smell those delicate white wine flavors, because this sparkling wine is made from white wine grapes and also the lace of the flute allows the very beautiful bubbles to be displayed to their best that they can be.

You've seen the traditional wine glass for sparkling wines is more of a cup glass. It's got a very wide opening. Some people still do use that to tell us for sparkling wines, it looks very fancy, but it's more for a sweeter sparkling wine, which is the olden times, in the old days, in the earlier part of the last century, people like their sparkling wines with more sweetness in them. So you didn't have to look for a delicate flavor that would be in a small opening to wine glass.

So if you're looking for sparkling wines, there are two kinds, there's cava, which would go in a tall champagne flute and a sweeter sparkling wine can go either in a champagne flute or it can go on one of those bowl sized traditional champagne glasses.

Then last, you'll see a smaller glass like this. These are for dessert wines and ports anything that's fortified with alcohol. You'll want it in a smaller portion. You won't serve a full portion five-six ounces of dessert wine. You simply won't need it. The wine is so sweet and the flavor is so strong that you won't drink as much of it as you would serve a typical serving portion in a larger glass. So this smaller glass is a perfect portion for after dinner drinks.

Now both Williams-Sonoma and Target have the top-of-the-line Riedel Glasses. You don't have to buy Riedel Glasses. You can buy a traditional wine glass in varied shapes. They even go down, I saw some of them last Christmas. The different shapes of wine glasses. So definitely if you want to invest in top-of-the-line Riedel Glasses, you can get them at Target or Williams-Sonoma and definitely at Target and Williams-Sonoma are both places to go and look and remind yourself of the different shapes and what wines are idea for them, and then you can purchase the glasses at anywhere that kitchenware is sold, practically now-a-days will sell different shapes in wine glasses.

So now that we've gone through the set of wine glasses ,and what wines they would traditionally be served in each glass, let's ask ourselves some questions to kind of test what we know. Would you consider owning more than one type of wine glass? This would be your typical entry level, one glass will be good for all wines or you're going to consider owning certain different types of wine glasses based on the types of wine you would want to serve, and which types of wine glasses do you think should be in your kitchen? Would you invest in a top-of-the-line Riedel Glass, or would you invest in may be more glasses for the same price in different shapes at a lower price point?

And last would you buy the more expensive glasses or would you instead want to invest in sturdier more economical glasses?

Thank you very much for watching this video, and I hope I've given you some tips, and taken away a little bit of the fear of which wine goes in which glass.

Have a great time, and if you want more information on wine and food pairing, please visit my blog at kathleenlisson.blogspot.com. Have a great time.