Jamie Goode: Does your wine glass really matter?

How much does a wine glass matter when it comes to enjoying wine? This is a really interesting, and sometimes contentious topic.

All of us have tales about how we enjoyed an expensive or rare wine out of an entirely unsuitable wine glass. Most American and Canadian hotels don’t have wine glasses or indeed any glasses in their rooms, and so often when I’ve been room-partying with wine friends we have drunk wine out of plastic cups. The red plastic Solo cups are an American icon, and I can say from repeated experience with these that they are terrible for wine. Vessels of last resort.

Not all plastic glasses are bad, though. For outdoor drinking, I can recommend the plastic stemless GoVino glasses. They are good for wine quality, and they don’t break. The only problem is that you can forget that these aren’t disposable but are meant to be washed and re-used, and you end up throwing them away. Which is annoying.

When it comes to actual wine glasses, the worst of all is the Paris Goblet. These are usually made of such thick glass they are indestructible: throw them at the wall, and if they don’t punch a hole in it, they will bounce back. They are awful for wine quality, they look horrid, and they don’t even have any retro-chic factor to make them at least partly loveable.

A glass that may not be great for quality, but which has retro chic, is the coupe. Champagne served in a coupe may lose its bubbles fast, but it is quite a cool experience, and the aroma of the wine is carried by the bubbles which volatalize wine components.

One famous London restaurant is famous for stubbornly sticking with terrible wine glasses. St John is a valued fixture in the dining scene, but they insist on serving wine out of tiny glasses that do the wine no favour, although they do look quite cool. I can live with this for table wine, and there’s nothing bad about accompanying great food with simple wine. But it puts me off going higher up the wine list.

I’m actually a fan of stemless glasses. I remember when Riedel launched their ‘O’ series, and many people were horrified about the thought of fingers holding the bowl of the glass. For many wine people civilization stops if people don’t hold a wine glass by the stem: the complaint is that you get horrible fingerprints on the bowl and the hands warm the wine up. With stemless glasses you have no choice. I love them: you get the benefit of the various Riedel glass shapes and the thin rims, without the inconvenience of the stem, and I really like the connection you get with the wine. They are also less likely to spill. And if you are careful with them, you can take them on picnics.

When it comes to fine glassware – ultralight mouth blown glasses with tiny micro-rims – there are two approaches. There’s the one-size-fits-all universal glass approach, and then there’s the multi-shape tailored to the wine style approach.

Gabriel Glass  takes the one-size approach, and this is a brilliant all-purpose glass that works for both whites and reds. They make a cheaper machine-made version and a fancy mouth-blown one, both in the same shape. The latter has a thinner rim and is quite beautiful, but the cheaper one does a good job too.

Riedel are the most famous name in glass design, and they have a glass for every wine style and variety, across a number of different ranges. The restaurant range is the least expensive, and if you can find a retailer to sell to you as a private consumer, and are prepared to buy 60 glasses at a time, then this is the cheapest way to stock some decent wine glasses. Vinum is the next step up, and they are very similar machine-blown glasses that offer quite good value. Then you can spend a lot more on the very thin, aesthetically pleasing top glasses.

At home I mostly drink from Zalto, and they have a range of glasses beginning with the universal shape, which is good for most wines, and then spanning a range of shapes which can get quite extreme, but they are simply beautifully made glasses and they work really well. The latest shape is the ‘balance’, and it’s a generously broad bowled glass, but quite short. It’s lovely.

Do we need a range of different shapes? One of my friends, Daniel Primack, represents Zalto in the UK, and he has strong feelings about how much impact the glass shape has on the experience of wine. And he’s smart, and I believe him. I’ve not experimented enough with the effect of different glasses: for me, the main thing is having a good glass, and this is part the effect this has on the wine, and part psychological. It’s an aesthetic thing. But perhaps I need to spend more time experimenting.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.

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