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Tasting glasses 05/09/2010 (TNB)

I had a fascinating conversation with David Harvey some time ago about glasses. He has taken to using "tumblers" with a fairly flat base and a broad opening at the top: quite the opposite of the traditional narrow-topped tasting glass.

His view (at least as I understood it) is that the traditional wine glass funnels up a load of alcohol and primary fruit flavours to your nose and overwhelms it, making it difficult to spot subtlety and genuine interest. If something has a fine nose from his glass, he said, then it really is good - rubbish wines become simply anonymous.

I could see his point on this, comparing as we did the Niepoort Port that we had in our glasses at the time. It reminded me too of people recommending something like the Riedel Montrachet glass for all wines. Of course, a glass that effectively gives less on the nose might enable better discrimination but still be less enjoyable, assuming ones purpose is drinking pleasure.

But I remain interested in this idea and have been using a glass like a slightly scaled down version of that Montrachet glass recently and I have to say it shows wines rather well. The glass is, I believe, a project of Gravner and Soldera to produce something suits both their wines.


Article added to Fine Wine Diary 05/09/2010   Return to top