Insignificant container in everyday life, glass becomes noble with the tasting ritual.Against common opinion, its shape plays an essential role in wine’s quality perception.Few elements define a typical tasting glass, to reveal a wine.
The Degustation Glass
The First quality of this glass, is to be perfectly translucent and colourless. It can restore precisely all the robe’s nuances of the wine, that we will appreciate in backlight or on a white background. Most of the time in crystal or crystalline, or, at least, cut through in a very thin glass, its fineness offers a tender “mouth feeling” that contribute to the tasting’s precision. Concerning the shape, it’s always tightened in the long-stemmed part of the glass, “glass’s body”, to concentrate the aromatic expression of wine. Beyond this typical model, a wide variety of tasting glasses is supposed to have specifics values for different wines or grapes.
Some of them displays a potbellied shape or a larger opening to foster the wine’s aeration, and, by this way, his aromatic expression; others, rather, adopt a longer style which would help wines still a little reserved to “open themselves”.
This requirement level is especially the fact of broken palates at the ceremonial of the professional wine tasting. However, the typical model (INAO glass for example) will fulfill his function in all wine tastings, whether white or red.
Finally, a bit of refinement. The aesthetics of tasting ask that glass have to be held by the foot or the leg. Besides elegance, this process avoid to warm-up the wine in the glass.
Alain Labatut
