Buying glasses for wine? Think big and rounded

There are a thousand wine-related gizmos out there these days, and if you’re a wine lover you might end up with some of them as presents in a few weeks.

Some, I like and use. Gas spray, to protect leftover wine from air, works, as do systems that involve suspending a cold metal tube into a bottle to keep the wine cool. Others, I’ve tried (and tested with other wine professionals) and found ineffective. With so many people interested in wine, it’s not surprising that hucksters have moved into the wine-accessory business.

One accessory we all use (well, almost all of us) is glasses. You can, of course, drink wine from anything, including the bottle or box (although the latter involves lying on the floor under the spigot), but it’s conventional to use a glass, and usually a glass designed for wine.

But are all wine glasses equally good? It was a question I was reminded of at a small wine judging event last week, and the judges were provided with glasses that we all looked at as if they had given us plastic beer cups.

These were wine glasses, all right — they had a bowl, a stem, and a base — but the bowl was small and it was the same width all the way to the rim.

That’s just a no-no. Much of tasting involves smelling, and you want a bowl that’s wide at the bottom and tapers at the top. It allows the aromas to collect in the glass so they’re released in a concentrated form when you swirl the glass and stick your nose in.

The bowl of a good wine glass should also be big. That’s not because you want it to hold a lot of wine. I have a glass that holds a bottle of wine, though I’ve never poured a full bottle into it because I’m afraid the weight of the wine would snap the stem and it doesn’t look good to be drinking that much wine at once. (Better to spread it out over four or five glasses.)

No, the bowl should be big enough that when you fill it to the widest point and get the broadest surface of wine (the maximum you should fill a glass), there is plenty of room for the aromas to gather.

Do you need a whole range of glasses — one for Chardonnay, another for Merlot, a third for Pinot Noir, and so on? No, you don’t. That’s just craziness. A big glass is great for all your wines, including sparkling wine. (Yes, get rid of the flutes.)

With all the complicated paraphernalia around wines these days, glasses are that uncomplicated.

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Casale Vecchio Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2013: This is one of the well-made and inexpensive Italian wines in the LCBO. Look for concentrated flavours with good complexity, balanced acidity and easygoing tannins. It’s dry and goes with hearty pastas, red...

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