Should one change glasses when drinking a different wine?

It all depends of the type of wine you are drinking. In general, you don’t drink red and white wines in the same glass. You can stick with the same glass if you are drinking the same wine (different bottle) or same varietal of wine. I do however recommend that one drink light bodied wine first and the more heavy-bodied thereon after.  If not, the heavier bodied wines will have more of an influence on the lighter bodied.

As a professional wine taster, when evaluating a wine, I will always use a clean glass. I do this even when I drink red wine followed by another red wine.  The same applies to all other types of wines.  After all, when you are done drinking a wine, you can still smell the aromas left in the glass. At tastings, I will try to change my glass as often as possible. In most tastings, you get one glass and have to make do with it. If that is the case, I will rinse my glass with bottled water whenever I feel it is necessary. The fuller the body, the more often I will rinse my glass.

At one tasting last month in Europe, I encountered a first. As I was poured a new wine into a glass I had already been using, the wine smelled faulty (onion). Not a scent you get too often and one you don’t miss out on. The interesting thing was that I was the only one to smell it. As I passed my glass to others, they validated my judgment and we started to investigate. It happened to be a phenomenon resulting from the combination of the new wine mixed with the wine I had been drinking previously.  The second wine never would have developed those particular aromas in a fresh glass.  I had never experienced such a dramatic example of the tainting of a wine due to the residues left in a glass. None of us ever had.  However being able to replicate that phenomenon validated my position that one should change glasses whenever drinking a different wine if possible. This is a recommendation I make to wine aficionados when drinking premium wines more so than to the main stream population.

This entry was posted on 25. January 2008 at 09:10 and is filed under Tips & FAQs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print