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BUYING THE RIGHT WINEGLASSES

The glass you drink from is almost as important as what’s inside it. Gerard Basset, master sommelier and owner of Hotel TerraVina in Hampshire, offers tips on glasses that are kind to the wine ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

Whether for a hotel or at home, a glass must balance quality and practicality. If it takes two hours to clean because you’re scared of touching it, it becomes a nonsense. But if it looks good, is kind to the wine and doesn’t break too easily, then you will use it a lot.

The bowl’s shape is so important. If you entertain a lot, it is nice to have three or four slightly different-shaped glasses; it stops you muddling wines if you serve maybe two or three glasses of Chardonnay and a Riesling to start, two or three different reds during the main course, and then perhaps one dessert wine (one is usually enough). But all of them must have bowls big enough so you can swirl the wine without splashing it—to see its colour, judge its alcohol content, and mix it with the air. What’s good are bowls that are tulip- or egg-shaped: they are narrow at the top to hold the wine’s aroma, but still wide enough to bury your nose in.

The rim of the glass should be very thin—though not so much it’s fragile—and without any lip, so the wine can flow onto the palette. And a long stem stops hands touching the bowl and warming the wine. But too long is not good. It makes the glass unstable and too easy to knock over on the table—or when the sommelier has 20 of them on his tray.

Glass itself is another matter. Lead or barium crystal, the sort you get from Riedel or Spiegelau, has a nice silvery look and is easy to cut, but it is quite delicate and expensive. Titanium crystal glass from Schott Zwiesel is newer; it is very good-looking, and it does not scratch so easily. Sodalime or heat-tempered glass is very heavy; it is more for barware and beer than a fine wine. But no glass should have colour—not even in the stem, as it puts reflections into the bowl.

As for price, I don’t expect to find high-quality glasses for less than £5 retail. For the record, at the hotel we use Libbey’s Aficionado range: they’re about £3 wholesale, a few pounds more retail. But don’t be mean—if you spend £30-plus on a wine, it deserves a proper glass to put it in.

~ INTERVIEW BY ISABEL LLOYD

Where to buy:

Ascot Wholesale:  Mail order (UK only); +44 (0)1252 875555
www.ascotwholesale.co.uk

El Corte Inglés:  Goya 76 and 85, Madrid, and branches across Spain; + 34 91 432 93 00; www.elcorteingles.es

Karstadt:  11-15 Schloss-strasse, 12167 Berlin, and branches across Germany; +49 (0)30 790010; www.karstadt.de

Riedel:  Mail order and stockists enquiries; +44 (0)844 800 1143; www.riedel.co.uk

Wineware:  Mail order (UK and Europe); + 44 (0)1903 786148; www.wineware.co.uk

(See previous Insider Trading stories about woodland, barbecues, training shoes, Persian carpets and wild mushrooms.)