Dive into a glass of wine

Dive into a small pool to swim in a big sea.

If you love good wine, you know that to appreciate this liquid and mysterious creature it takes one last important step that will take him from the depths of the earth to the table and your mouth: the glass.

The right glass allows the wine to “play” well and is for the wine like a good musical instrument is for the score.

The glass must in fact be made with a suitable raw material, it must have a particular shape and must be handled with care and wisdom, to make sure that its content emit all the notes that wine contains.

To begin with, a good glass for the wine must be made out of glass or crystal, inert materials which do not retain odors, also must be transparent to bring out the colors, its thickness should not be excessive so as not to give an unpleasant feeling to the lips during the tasting. Its shape must be a cup, that is, it must have a stem like a flower, because this allows to keep the wine at a distance from the temperature of our body, which is about 36 °C: this contact can alter the scents, and you can appreciate them well if every wine is at the right temperature: white wine should be cool, say about 10 °C, red wines such as Chianti and Super Tuscans should keep the cellar temperature, around 18 °C.

For this reason it is also important to remember that, when tasting the wine, the glass must be maintained to its base or in the lower part of the stem, as well as it needs to be filled up to not more than a third of the volume of the glass itself, so that the oxygen contained in revivals all wine vitality, who was resting in the bottle.

Each wine prefers his “service” glass.

For example, young white wine, normally very sugary, wish a glass where the opening is wider than the body of the glass, because this particular shape directs the liquid mainly to the tip of the tongue, more sensitive to sweetness, and it allows you to focus aromas towards the nose while emphasizing the perception of delicate and fruit aromas, typical of young wines.

In Italy we call this glass “tulip”, because it has the same shape of the typical Netherland flower. The full-bodied Italian white wines such as Vernaccia di San Gimignano or even red wines such as Chianti, which can be enjoyed in one of our entertaining one day wine tasting tour, they want to “dive” into larger glasses made with a rather wide bowl and narrow rim, to allow a proper oxygenation to all the spilled wine and make sure that the perfumes and flavorings, which are really a lot of, first focus on the inner edge of the cup and then go up the nose and on the palate a few at a time, to be gradually recognized and enjoyed. This glass is called “ballon”, and the rule is easy: the more serious the wine, the bigger the balloon.

The opening of this glass can be high and straight in order to first direct the wine in the back and at the sides of the mouth and then get to the tip of the tongue so as to be able to taste the wine in its completeness and complexity, but can also be slightly open at the edges to better distribute the famous “bouquet” of the wine.

The aromatic wines, however, want the “coup de champagne”, because its very large rim make it easy to immediately feel all the flavors, while the Champagne, the Italian “spumante” and all the sparkling love the flute to better express their liveliness in … bubbles.

By following these guidelines, even without bathing suit, with just a simple sip of wine you can have a real refreshing dive: in fact the first you feel is to be completely overcome by the scents of nature and then you will have a special feeling if lightness and pleasantness: just as the waves of the sea do!