Picking Your Glasses

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The Newman's Own Organics Guide

A Glass is a Glass is a Glass

We’re not going to tell you that you can’t drink that velvety Burgundy out of a Dixie cup. Sure you can. And you can eat caviar with plastic spoons off a paper plate too. But why would you want to?

Matching the right glass to your wine will enhance your enjoyment of wine just as much as chopped egg and lemon juice will enhance your enjoyment of a spoon of beluga caviar.


Essentially, there are three different classic shapes for wine glasses, all of them with stems so that the heat of the hand won’t warm the wine inside. Each of these shapes has evolved to enhance the type of wine it holds. The shape of a glass doesn’t alter the taste of the wine, but it can alter the perception of the experience. For example, a balloony red wine glass allows the drinker to inhale all the various aromas of a wine’s nose while the more bell-shaped white wine glass doesn’t allow the fullest development of these aromas.

If you’re on a limited budget, there is such a thing as an all-purpose wine glass. Its bowl isn’t as big as a classic red wine glass and it’s not as streamlined as the classic white wine shape. In short, like most things in life, it’s a compromise. No one is going to make fun of you serving wine in these glasses, so long as the glass is clear (colored glass muddies the color of wine) and clean.

Once you get serious about wine, you may want to get serious about glasses. Invest in a set of red wine and a set of white wine glasses. A red wine glass has a deeper bowl than a white wine glass. The deeper bowl intensifies the wine’s fruit and balances the tannins. If you’re a really serious red wine drinker, you might also want to invest in a set of the extremely rounded wide bowl glasses that especially enhance complex reds like the Pinot Noirs, and the Burgundies.

White wine glasses have more of a bell shape to them, and a much narrower bowl. If you’re serving both white and red wine at one meal, the glasses look different enough that even a novice will know which glass is appropriate for which wine.

Champagne and other sparkling wines require a narrow-mouthed glass to make certain that the bubbles don’t escape too quickly, turning the wine “flat.” There are three classic shapes of champagne glass available: the tulip, which is narrower at the rim than it is at the middle of the bowl; the flute, which is a longer and more elongated glass; and the trumpet; which flares out from the base in a way that looks elegant but isn’t as ideal for maintaining the bubbles in a sparkling wine. Purists prefer the tulip glass, but any of the three shapes is appropriate and festive. Just don’t use those old-fashioned, saucer-shaped champagne glasses. They expose too much surface area of the wine and will kill the bubbles.

As in most things in life, size does matter. Even though you don’t want to fill a wine glass more than one-half (some say no more than one-third), wine glasses should hold a minimum of 12 ounces. Some red wine glasses can hold 16-24 ounces, an ideal size to help aerate red wines.

Save those dinky little glasses for serving tiny portions of sherry to your great aunt.