Flute glasses are ruining your bubbly
I gave up the flute glass years ago. It was a pretty easy decision to make, since I was seeing so many other people giving it up. They were drinking sparkling wine from — brace yourself — regular wine glasses. And it was awesome.
The broad-sweeping flute kiss-off was occurring at wineries. In visit after visit, sparkling wine was being handed to me in a regular wine glass. The “regular” wine glass we’re talking about is what would technically be referred to as a Bordeaux glass — straight-sided and tapering slightly to the rim.
Quite often, the people serving bubbles in regular glasses were the very people who had made the wine. They all said that a regular glass lets the wines’ aromas run free. And we all know how connected and important our sense of smell is to our sense of taste. If winemakers thought their wine was not as good in a flute as it was in a regular glass, there must be something to it, right?
I still have a few flutes, but they have not seen any action in years — except for one recent night, when I pulled them down from a shelf for some side-by-side blind-sniffing. A small group of willing participants — each of them a casual wine drinker with no formal training — tied cloth napkins around their heads to cover their eyes and promised to do their best to describe what they were about to smell. I poured five sparkling wines into flutes, poured the same wines into regular glasses, and asked my guests for their impressions of each.
Pretty much across the board they picked the regular glass. The words they used to describe the wines in the regular glasses were often more pleasant; they were also more abundant than the words they used to describe the wines in the flutes.
The flutes did have one advantage. At times they gave off the impression of freshness. The idea is that the long, thin cylinder helps keep the bubbles bubbly. And looking pretty.
Still, I can’t think of much reason to drink from a flute, unless the esthetics are that important to you. The amped-up bubble action is fun, but to me it’s not worth cutting off your ability to swirl and sip with relative ease. So if you’re still trying to come up with a New Year’s resolution, here you go: Quit the flute.