Straight forward?

As debate rages over the relative merits of straight-sided and curved wine glasses, Anne Krebiehl MW looks at the arguments for and against

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT a good wine glass should have certain basic attributes: a stem so that our hands won’t unduly change the wine temperature, a generous bowl that allows for low-level filling and swirling and, most importantly, a tapering top to prevent volatile aromas from dissipating immediately. This is best described as a tulip shape. So far so good – but does it make a difference whether those tapering sides are straight or curved?

Daniel Primack, founder of Winerackd, one of the UK’s leading glass suppliers, and a trained biochemist, says: ‘Some people do wine tastings; I do glass tastings. People come and think this is about tasting wine, but it’s about your perception of the differences the glasses make. You may prefer the flavour of a particular wine in one glass or another, but in this context, the glasses make the difference.’

When Decanter reported on the advantage tulip-shaped glasses have over flutes or coupes for sparkling wine (December 2015 issue), the

Daniel Primack reasoning was anchored in physics, in the way the bubbles travel and burst. In the case of curved versus straight walls, science holds no answer; there are no studies, no comparisons that would favour either camp. What is undeniable, though, is that there is a difference in sensory perception.

For Zalto, the main proponents of straightwalled glasses, it boils down to a question of directness – of using the shortest distance between two points. Zalto’s managing director, Christoph Hinterleitner, explains: ‘Every wine glass has certain parameters: the fill volume, the diameter which determines the surface area of the wine, the distance from fill-level to rim, the size of the opening and the side walls. If you reduce all these parameters to their simplest form and connect the points you will get a straight line, not a curve – a curve would simply add another variable.’

At Schott-Zwiesel, producers of both curved and straight glasses, brand manager Gerhard

‘You should spend at least as much on the glass as you spend on the wine’