Wine Glasses – My Way

Anything is a wine glass if you try hard enough. These are 20 oz drinking glasses, presumably for water or iced tea. However, in our household they are wine glasses. We just replaced our old chipped ones with these babies.

My wife and I will split a bottle of wine about once a week, and we are lazy. Sure, I could do the wine glass thing, then refill our glasses, but let’s face it, that’s a bit disingenuous. It’s like saying, let’s have a glass of wine, maybe a half glass, knowing full well we are just going to spit the whole bottle between us, and be done with it.

Yes, there are benefits to the wine glass shape. The stem is to keep your filthy mitts off the glass so you don’t mess up the temperature. The shape is also supposed to help with flavor and aroma of the wine to give the imbiber the best flavor experience.

However, at least according to this article, wine making dates back 9000 years, and wine glasses as we know them didn’t even start appearing until the 15th century when we could make crystal glass, presumably for those that could afford them. It wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that they made it into popular usage as we know them now, and really didn’t pick up in their current form until the 1970s.

In all, the article is a good read, because it goes over the science of it all, and it turns out there isn’t a lot to back the idea of traditional wine glasses.

For me? If you love traditional wine glasses? Go for it. However, I am going to sit in my corner drinking my wine, while petting my cat, and crocheting or playing on my iPad. I could care less about the form of my glass, and I care more about having to get up and refill my glass. Plus, I doubt my palate could tell the difference anyways.