BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Wine Is Glassware Important?

Temperature is one of the major factors most over looked by wine drinkers. "Room temperture" doesn't mean 75F. When reviewing a red wine I ususally include the proper serving temperature.

I have a marble wine holder. If opening the bottle and leaving the wine to breathe I will usually put it in the chilled holder.

Not only older reds need to breathe. I have a great Prado Rey that REALLY needs to breathe before drinking. I just had an Aaku Shiraz that improved greatly after being allowed to breathe. Each wine has its own character that needs to be repected.

Here's a good question then - one we had a lot of trouble with during my experiment. You usually know *what* temperature to aim for with a wine. But how do you get there? Say you have a red and are trying to hit 63F with it. You're storing your wine at 55F, so you don't want to chill it any more! How do you ensure it gets to 63F, and how do you keep it at that temperature, and how do you even know it IS at that temperature?

I store my wine at 14 degrees Celcius amd have at 14-18 depending on the wine. If it needs no decanting - there is no problem. If it needs decanting and its temperature raises then I put something cold under my decanter (like that medical thing I mentioned), so, it remains fresh. That is if you need to lower the temperature. If you need to raise it, then just pour the wine into the glass and wait till it reaches an OK temperature, usually just a few minutes. I see no problem. And I use special wine thermometre to measure its temperature, very convenient. So, it just the matter of monitoring. You see it to cold? - remove decanter from the artificial cooling device. You see it too warm? - Put it on it again.

OK I found a celcius conversion chart, I think in F <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

OK wine is stored normally at 55F which is 13C so you're close to that. You say you then serve wines at 14-18C which is a good range for reds - Chianti/Zin is good at 15C/59F and Bordeaux/Shiraz is good at 18C/64F. Whites should be colder, down around 8C/47F. But I'll assume you're only drinking reds.

So you take this bottle out and let's say you decant it. Do you actually leave a thermometer sitting in the decanter for the meal now, so you know whether or not to sit the decanter on the freeze pack?

I have one of those by the way and use it a ton for cooling whites down from storage temperature. You mean like this right?

I do like white wines. But they are not easy to come by, I mean good ones. I like the ones that have been stores in barrels for some time, they have that olive oil look and taste good to me. But they a lot harder to make than normal young white wines.

No real need to have the thermometre always in the decanter. Let say you need to decant a red one for an hour. You take out of the fridge at say 13 or 14 degrees. Pour it in and put on the table. And room temperature is around 22-25. It gets warm of course. But maybe 10 minutes before you'll consume it (that is maybe 50 minutes from beginning of the decanting), you put that thing under the decanter to cool it down. And lets say it gets down to 15, and you want it at 17. So, you pour your wine into the glass and put the thermometre in it. It wall warm up rather fast, in a couple of minutes it will be at 17. So, the process doesn't require constant monitoring and ofcourse you do not need to have that cooling thing all the time under the decanter, just in the end, prior to consuming, to level the temperature.

I'd like you all to share an opinion on following dillema:

I like the the Rosenthal porcelain by Versace design and have quite a few sets. There is also Versace glasswork which looks great. I have th glasses for the whites, but not for the reds. Now, Riedel is the professional thing and the best anyony could ever need, but for some special occasions, some more impactable pieces work great. There are these red wine glasses. The dillema is that they are 28cm tall and I can guess that they are unstable. Each one costs around $180. I wouldn't like any funny looks if some invited guest accidentially flips it over and it falls on the table. From this height damage is almost guaranteed. What do you think? They look gorgeous and I'd like to have them, but I'd also like to use them and only look at them standing behind cristal. Is a glass this tall a "dangerous" item on the table?

I guess that's assuming that when you get the decanter to the right temperature that you pour out the entire decanter and then immediately drink it all. But usually it's just 2 of us eating dinner. So that decanter and wine is sitting on the table for a good 45 minutes - hour or so. Wine can warm up a huge amount in that time. Same thing at a restaurant, sometimes meals can take 1 1/2 hrs easily.

Actually, I'm a huge fan of Riedel because it ends up allowing the wine to taste perfect. I wouldn't use another glassware that "looked pretty" and ruin my wine <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> If it was a truly special occasion I'd buy a truly fabulous wine and then would do everthing remotely in my power to make that wine taste perfect. So those would be the situations that I would *most certainly* be pouring into Riedel and nothing else. I can't think of any occasion that I would not use Riedel but would use something else of the same or higher category.

If I was having a casual picnic I would probably go down to my regular wineglasses so that I didn't care if they got broken. But for anything that I cared about, I'd be in the Riedel definitely.

I think this comes back to our "I want it to look good" vs "I want it to taste good" discussion <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I am showcasing the wine's flavor. I want the wine to taste its best, so other prettyness concerns are secondary to me. I guess for me doing otherwise would be like buying a really expensive perfume in a lovely bottle that smelled awful. It would miss the entire point for me <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I guess you're exagerating a bit. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Glasses certainly are not as professionally elaborated as Riedel, but they are of a correct shape, so, only minor variations in taste may appear. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> That's my guess.





They are something like this, but even better, with a golden Versace ornament in two places. I just like them. My only concern is the size.

Still, there is no problem, you would have to have your decanter nearby and keep an eye on it. For how long can you be drinking one glass of wine? 10-20 minutes or so? You see your glass getting dry, put the cooling thing under the decanter. When glass is completely dry in about 5 minutes, you pour in some more and measure the temperature. Too cold? - wait minute, still to warm? - ignore and keep on drinking. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> You just need to do it mechanically without distracting yourself too much from the dinner, or it will spoil it. Plus/ minus one or even two degrees won't kill the taste.