WISDOM IN A GLASS
Whether it’s the finer points of horse racing or expert guidance in the fine art of wine appreciation, The Racing Club offers countless opportunities to enhance your knowledge and your life
I KNEW THAT there are different shapes and sizes for wine glasses, but I was never aware of how important it is to have the right glass for the right wine, or the difference the wine glass – or stemware – makes in the appreciation of the nuances of wine. Whenever I go to an event hosted by The Racing Club I learn something new, whether it’s by enriching my knowledge of horse racing or through immersion in one of the club’s exciting lifestyle programmes, such as the wine glass tasting event I went to recently. At the event, we learned that there are three key elements to stemware – the base, the stem and the bowl – but the best glasses, known as grape-varietal-specific stemware, have finely tuned bowls whose three variables of size, shape and rim diameter are crucially important if you want to appreciate a wine fully. The bowl size determines how much air is in contact with the wine, the shape controls how the wine flows to the opening, and the rim diameter regulates how fast the wine flows and how it’s delivered to the palate. We had top-grade Riedel grape-varietal-specific stemware on hand, provided by Riedel’s distributor, Town House, whose general manager Suresh Kanji led the tasting session. I was astonished to learn from Kanji that “70 percent of a wine’s aroma comes from smelling, and only 30 percent from the palate”. Intrigued, I wanted to know how stemware affects this. Kanji first took us through the four sensations of wine: bouquet, the quality and intensity of the aroma; texture, the exciting and diverse styles of “mouthfeel”; flavour, the balanced interaction between the fruit, minerality, acidity and bitter components; and finish, the pleasant, seamless, harmonious, and long-lasting aftertaste. He further explained the two ways to smell wine: orthonasal olfaction, or sniffing in the glass, and retronasal olfaction, which is when aromas travel up the internal nares located inside the mouth to the nose. This is why some people swoosh the wine inside their mouth – it’s to facilitate the aroma entering the internal nares. I felt a sort of epiphany when we were handed a goblet, a glass from days of yore formed by pouring molten glass over a cone-shaped mould, thus precluding the possibility of fine-tuning the shape. The aroma and taste of the wine we sampled from it was totally different – and definitely inferior – to that of the same wine from a piece of grape-varietal-specific stemware. Apart from the wine, we enjoyed Parma ham, Emmental cheese and chocolates that were specifically selected to pair perfectly with the different types of wines. And of course, the time to meet and mingle with other like-minded racing enthusiasts, with friendships that go beyond the race-track.