Classic Wines

Wine Glasses

If you believed everything you read in the magazines... you could have washboard abs without having to exercise, learn how to woo members of the opposite sex by reading brief little 500-word columns on the subject, and learn to sink a putt from 50 feet every time.

You would also, unfortunately, end up going broke. Because if you believed everything you’ve every heard about wine glasses, you would be dropping insane amounts of money on each and every stem.

Yes, like so much else in this crazy world we live in, even wine glasses have gotten the Paris Hilton treatment. They’ve been blown way out of proportion and been given far more press than they rightly deserve. Also, much like that famous debutante, they will end up costing you a fortune if you get involved with them.

The truth is that you don’t have to spend that much money to get a great set of glasses. In fact, if you’re a casual drinker, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with heading on over to Ikea and buying a bunch of their $2 glasses. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters when it comes to them is that the lip of the glass is narrower than the widest part of the bowl.

The reason is simple: Because it’s really the only shape that works. Let’s think about this for a moment: 90% of what you taste is actually what you smell. That’s why you can’t taste much of anything when you have a head cold. And wine, complex and multi-faceted as it is, requires that we make as much of an effort as possible to experience as many of its aromas as we can. (Hence all that swirling and sniffing that wine lovers do.)

So if your wine glass simply angled out, mimicking the shape of a tulip, then all  those aromas would just float away, and you wouldn’t experience the wine in the glass nearly as intensely as if it were served in a proper stem.

What makes those Ikea glasses so nice is that they’re shaped appropriately enough to trap in all those aromas, and the price is right: If you break one or two of them, it doesn’t matter. You didn’t spend a lot of money on them in the first place.

Where things get confusing is with the higher-end glasses, the ones made by companies like Riedel, that are ostensibly designed for specific types of wines. This is also where things get expensive.

The theory behind these glasses is that they are designed to enhance the best characteristics of each specific type of wine. Essentially, they allow the wines to put their best foot forward, maximizing the parts of them that are most appealing and minimizing everything else.

And while these glasses can be beautiful, and while they can absolutely make certain wines taste better than they otherwise would have—the Riedel Vinum Series pinot noir glass, for example, tends to make that wine sing in ways it doesn’t in other types of vessels—they tend to be expensive. They, for example, cost anywhere from $20 to $25 each. And if you wanted to go to the next level, to that company’s Sommelier Series glasses, you’ll end up dropping $75 to $95—per glass!

When I got engaged, one of the first things I registered for was a set of Riedel Vinum wine glasses. And while I love them—how could I not? Other people paid for them…—I have broken more than a few over the years. Now that it’s time to replace some of them, and now that I have to pay for them myself, I’ve decided to downgrade a bit.

Fortunately, that doesn’t mean I have to get cheap glasses. Rather, it simply means spending a bit less. The Spiegelau Vino Grande series, for example, is a great option. The glasses look almost exactly like their Riedel-branded counterparts, but they’re a fraction of the cost (a set of six Magnum Bordeaux glasses will run you $55 on amazon.com right now). And Target, that emporium of all things stylish and cheap, sells the Riedel Vivant series glasses for $40 for a set of four. These are a bit smaller than their Vinum counterparts, but they’re still significantly larger than the ones most people are used to.

Just think of all that money you’ll save by buying less expensive stemware. And how much more wine you’ll be able to afford to fill those glasses with.