The best of these glasses worked with the wine as a conductor works with an orchestra, or a music producer at a mixing desk. While the Nude glass simply didn’t have the depth to bring out red wine aromas, that was more the fault of its straight up-and-down shape the round-bellied Riedel Champagne Wine Glass isn’t much bigger than the Nude, but its shape accentuated the red wines better. With red wines, shape can be more important than size. Straight-sided glasses such as Zalto, Jancis Robinson and Nude lose nuance in aroma delivery, especially when it came to dry whites. The perfect shape seems to be the slightly “plumped” bowl of the Gabriel and Zwiesel. Too wide a mouth and the aromas are lost. The most important conclusion we came to is that shape matters: it’s essential that the wine is given space to breathe in the glass and that the aromas are channelled effortlessly towards the nose and palate. This is necessarily a very subjective exercise, but drinks consultant and former senior buyer at Berry Bros Matt Smith and I agreed on 90 per cent of our findings and had no difficulty in finding consensus. The Jancis Robinson glass, for example, allowed the Martin Codax Albariño to show remarkable length. We were astonished by how important a glass is in delivering not only the early palate but the length as well. The glasses are ungainly and too big to be practical, but they seem to have an extraordinary effect on aroma. Anyone interested in the possibilities of this shape should try Riedel’s new “Wine Wings” range (not part of our test). Both are exquisite artefacts, lovely to handle and to hold, but the slightly plumper bowl of the Gabriel seems to pool and channel the aromas slightly better than the straight-sided Zalto. There’s no love lost between the two manufacturers (Zalto aficionadoes mutter darkly that Gabriel is a mere knock-off of their favourite). The former is the chosen glass of most top UK sommeliers (it’s the house glass of London wine-themed members’ club 67 Pall Mall for example) the latter is favoured by US sommeliers. However, they are delicate the Spiegelau scored top marks for practicality on the basis that it looks and feels unbreakable, even when washing up after a very good party the Zalto, however, snapped off at the stem mid-clean.Įxercises of this sort often end up as a battle of the titans – Zalto and Gabriel. On the question of practicality, all the manufacturers pride themselves on the fact that their glasses are dishwasher-proof. Each glass was tested with the four wines listed below. We tested the glasses on four criteria: practicality (how robust are they, for example?) appearance, feel and balance how they showed off a wine’s aroma and how they showed off its palate. The Eisch fell down more on shape (we felt all the wines were dulled by its wide mouth and large bowl) than weight the Spiegelau, unpretentious, workaday and practical, worked very well – but both were outshone in this quality line-up. The Eisch Sensisplus Bordeaux and the Speigelau are machine-made and so considerably heavier than their hand-blown counterparts. In a similar way, producers had all been encouraged to send their top-of-the-range glasses to ensure as level a playing field as possible. As we felt the Syrah/Shiraz glass was just too big for white wines, we decided to include the Champagne glass as the nearest in shape and size to our other samples. Riedel, for example, said that its Syrah/Shiraz glass is the “nearest we have to an all-rounder”, but also sent its Champagne glass, which it often suggests to restaurants as a good versatile option. To that end, we asked the manufacturers to send us whichever model they considered their best “all-round” glass. Nonetheless, our aim in this undertaking was to find the best single go-to glass to serve all purposes. But most wine drinkers tend to favour a different glass at least for red and white wines, and our tasting appears to bear that approach out: some glasses (notably the Jancis Robinson-Richard Brendon) showed one colour better than the other. Swiss producer Gabriel is of the same mind. Jancis Robinson, who launched her range of glassware with the designer Richard Brendon in 2018, insists you need only one glass for all wines. But there’s been a backlash against such profligacy, with most wine drinkers concluding that life’s too short (and houses too small) to keep different glasses for old world and new world Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and five different regional renderings of Pinot. The old-established Austrian glass manufacturer Riedel, for example, makes hundreds of different glasses for different grapes – there are several options for Pinot Noir alone, depending on where it comes from. Even within wine circles, it’s a polarising subject. Selecting the right glass is one of those tasks that wine lovers take very seriously indeed while the rest of the world looks on with bemusement.
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