Think of your wine glass as a vessel holding and transporting precious cargo. You need the right vessel for a certain cargo. Unfortunately, a dinghy won't do for an MSC container.
We forget the importance of wine glasses when drinking our wine. Some of us even use an ol' coffee mug!
While this is perfectly ok, the importance of correctly pairing the glass to wine is "pretty special". There's even science to back this up! Have a look at a 2015 Japanese study on how certain glasses emit vapours from the wine.
Working in a fine dining restaurant I discovered this marvel. Red wine = broader brims and rounded bowls. White wine = narrower brims and plumper bowls. Not to mention other wines such as sparkling, rose, fortified and so on.
Coming back to the importance of your glasses, it can be the deal-breaker between yay or nay. At least for me.
I was drinking a Pinotage from a dry climate terroir, out of a fortified wine glass. This is how a fortified wine glass looks:
The Pinotage tasted caramelly, over-stewed stewed fruit; you forgot the jam stewing on the pot kinda thing and added more sugar than needed and oak-aged. Terrible.
But, this was my fault, I was too hasty and couldn't find the right glass so grabbed the closest thing.
A glass for a Pinotage should look like this:
See the difference?
Good! Going back to the brims and bowls. Full-bodied red wines require more space and place to open up. To awaken from a slumber of usually 2–3 years (the length they're in the bottle for). Stretch their arms and luge back and forth across the room to loosen up! More textures, more complex aromas to release and more expressions to impart on us.
Whereas most white wines, except an oak-aged Chardonnay maybe, are zesty, their aromas are more direct and this you want to preserve as they tend to "vanish" quicker than a red wine's aromas.
The narrower brim also allows more expressions of acidity in your white wine and allows the wine to maintain a cooler temperature. Both super aspects that make for a great white wine.
