Designer Wine Glasses

Your guide to choosing the right wine glass serving wine in proper wineglasses can not only enhance the drinking pleasure and bring out the best in any wine, it also adds a touch of class.

It was a very classy affair with the correct wine glasses — two for the white wines, one a Burgundy and another a Bordeaux glass, giving the extra touch of class. Earlier, the hotel had used the proper, tulip shaped glasses for the bubbly.

Wine glasses can certainly add to the enjoyment of wine. Their special shapes are designed to get the most aromas and flavoursout of particular wines. There is nothing more off-putting than those small glasses with a short thick stem that many of the restaurants still use, though most of the hotels have already switched to better quality stemware; the better availability has helped too.

RIEDEL - KING OF WINE GLASSES: Undoubtedly
Riedel (pronounced nee-dl) is universally accepted as a top quality producer of wine glasses. The 325-year-old family-owned Austrian company with glass making roots in Bohemia revolutionized the wineglass industry 50 years ago. It changed the stemware from traditional heavy, coloured and cut glass to plain, thin blown, long stemmed_ unadorned glasses.

Professor Claus Riedel was the first designs to recognize that the bouquet, taste, balance and finish of wines are important characteristics of wine that differentiate it from other beverages and there are affected by the shape of the glass from which we sip. Pioneering work to create stemware that work match and complement different wines.

In the late 1950s, he started to producer glasses which were a design revolution. Thin-blown, unadorned, reducing the design to 35 essence: bowl, stem, base. Working wick experienced tasters, he discovered that wine enjoyed from his glasses showed more depci and better balance than when served in oche glasses.

Many variants and makes are now available — the classy ones are still from Europe, specially Australia, Czech, Germany (due to the huge production base not that the Germans are necessarily sophisticated in their drinking style.) Italians known for their penchant for design, also make some quality stemware though their glassmaking techniques are no parallel to the Austrians and Czechs. Spiegelau and Schott Zwiesel are other popular brands fine dining restaurants carry today.

Many reasonably priced glasses with fairly acceptable- shapes from Hong Kong and Thailand have also made an appearance over the last couple which had bombarded with cheap, moulded cut glass that matched the cheap available French wine claims to have moved with times with properly designed glasses in their portfolio.

What may make the plain glasses look expensive is the addition of lead crystal in quality glasses. This makes the glasses more scratch proof and they sparkle for year to come, though the stems and thin rims make the glasses vulrerableto breakages due to mis-handling.

The indomitable Riedel also came out with stemless series glasses a few years ago for restaurants to solve this problem. Great as water tumbler, costing half the price, this market growth strategy does not seem to have impressed the Indian market yet. But as wine gets popular with younger people, the invasion of bars and pubs with such glasses is imminent, in order to address the breakage issue.

Many restaurant owners shudder to unpack such expensive glasses, some of which can hold two-thirds of a bottle. Reason the customers who order wine by the glass feel they are being cheated with seemingly small quantities. I always advise them to explicitly make the serving quantity known when sold by the glass 0.25 ml, 150 nil are more common and diligently pour the measured quantity, even if it means checking out for a special customer.

No matter what else goes into creating the dining experience at the house or the restaurant, the use of proper wine glasses, as our friend from the US noticed will certainly add a touch of class.