MAKE IT CLEAR

ENHANCE YOUR GIFT OF A FAVOURED BOTTLE BY PAIRING IT WITH THE PERFECT DRINKING GLASS, WHETHER FOR BEER, SPIRITS OR WINE.

Make your gift of a favoured bottle—whether beer, spirits or wine—extra special by pairing it with a complementary drinking glass.

A FRIEND ONCE GAVE ME a vintage wine glass. It was a beautiful green and handsomely decorated but you couldn’t see much of the wine inside—or smell it properly, since the bowl was rather small—an example of how the wrong glass can deaden your enjoyment of wine.

The right glass, on the other hand, can enhance it no end, as was proved to me recently when George Riedel, 10th generation CEO of Austria’s Riedel glass company, came to Toronto and held a lunchtime seminar. His purpose was to show how wine glasses with a subtly di erent shape change the way we experience a wine. Inspired by his father’s pioneering work in this field, George Riedel has been conducting these experiments for decades, basing them on trial and error, with the help of wine experts the world over. It was a most convincing demonstration (see next page) and it has given me a fail-safe gift for any connoisseur—a bottle of his or her favourite wine and the Riedel glass precisely calibrated to show it at its best.

But there’s no reason to restrict the idea of a glass and a bottle to wine. An aficionado of fine spirits would be just as happy with a gift that flatters their own field of interest. As would that buddy who started collecting branded beer glasses when he was at college and still shows them o proudly in his basement. They can be hard to come by but the LCBO always carries a selection of gift packs over the holiday season that include glassware as well as the beer that goes in it. A bottle is only a bottle, but a bottle and an appropriate glass is something to keep and remember.