[MUSIC] Welcome back, everyone. I think it is important relatively early in our first lecture to talk about wine glasses. Glasses are the vessels that we use to contain liquid. And obviously, you can taste wine out of anything that doesn't leak. You could use a Dixie cup. You could use a beer stein. You could use a solo cup. You could use almost anything. However, there are certain types of glasses that we call stemware that are ideally suited for tasting wine. We're doing a thoughtful, critical, sensory evaluation of wine. So we need a vessel that shows off the wine and enables us to look at it and smell it and taste it very, very easily. I brought an assortment of glasses with me today to show you some of the pros and cons of glasses. We have here a Claret glass, a Bordeaux type glass. This is a rather large one, make sure you can see it. We also have a Burgundy glass, sometimes called a Burgundy balloon. See it looks like a balloon with a little string on it. For sparkling wine or champagne, we often use flutes. Named flutes, because of their long appearance and they can either be straight up and down or they can have a little bulbous section. I should make an aside though, and tell you that most sparkling wine serious tasters don't use flutes. Flutes are more festive. A sparkling wine taster will actually use a glass somewhat like we're going to use for tasting wine. Years ago, when I was a student, I bought quite a few dozen of a glass that's called the ISO glass, probably because I got a good deal on it, but the ISO glass came out in the 1970s and it was proposed by the International Standard Organization as a glass would be ideal for wine tasting. So, I'm not promoting this glass. It's the only glass that you should use, but the idea of having a standard ISO glass is that if you report on the result of your tasting, someone else elsewhere in the world can reconstruct that tasting and know exactly which glass you used. Why is that important? Because glasses can deliver aromatics, differently. So, I'd like to use the same glass every time. In fact, I've used this glass consistently for years and years and years. And so when I look back on my notes taken on wines that I tasted using this glass and I retaste those wines or similar wines in the present, I can actually connect my sensory memories and connect my notes to the past. Another type of glass that I use alternately is similar in shape, but just a little bit larger. I should tell that the ISO glass contains about eight ounces and this other white wine tasting glass holds about ten ounces. We're not using these at a dinner party, we're using these for sensory evaluation. So, we're not going to pour more than an ounce or an ounce and a half at the most. Occasionally, two ounces in each of these glasses. So the capacity needs to be much, much greater than the amount we pour. However, if we use a glass like this, the capacity is so much greater than the amount of wine that we should pour for tasting that we have a huge dilutionary effect of all of that airspace inside the glass and much, much is lost. The same thing would be true with this very, very oversized burgundy balloon. Some comments on the architecture of a glass, a wine glass needs to curve in on itself. It needs to be egg shaped or tulip shaped, so that you can swirl it and not have the liquid fly out of the glass. I brought my martini glass to show you how that wouldn't be possibly with a martini glass. I have quite a few ties that are heavily decorated with red wine or actually with gin, [LAUGH] because of swirling absentmindedly my martini glass. So, the nice thing about this curvature is that it allows you to swell while still keeping the wine in the glass. The advantage of having a bowl that curves in on itself in addition to being able to swirl without wine flying out all over the place is that this curvature affords a kind of a dead airspace or no fly zone, so to speak. Where the the volatile aromatics that you agitate by swirling can inhibit this space for a few moments, so that there will be available for you to sniff them. So you swirl, swirl, swirl and go and sniff and there they are. If I were to hand this glass to someone else and say, hey, this is a really neat wine, you need to smell this. And they just put it up to their nose and smell it, they won't smell anything. Well, you've actually just inhaled all of the aromatics out of that glass. So, they have to re-swirl and suspend those aromatics all over again. So, this is a good space and a good architecture. If the bowl is very, very tall, what happen is that certain very aggressive aromatics can climb to the top of the glass. I remember the last time I used a huge oversize glass and this glass. By the way, can hold almost a whole bottle of wine, believe it or not. Actually, the last time I used a glass like this and I had about a 1 ounce pour in about a 22-ounce space, I recall swirling and swirling and swirling and then really, only being able to smell alcohol and a little bit of wood. All the fruit notes that I knew were likely to be in that wine were all sort of down closer to the surface. And when I swirled and looked down in the glass, I got a little sense of vertigo. My eyes felt like they were a mile from the surface of that liquid. So another reason to stick with a little smaller bowl, particularly with sensory evaluation in mind. Also, a narrow opening is better and the ratio of the opening to the width of the bowl of the glass is kind of important. It's better to have it more and more open. If it's too far open, we tend to lose things right out the top. If it's too pinched, sometimes the glass can accentuate aromatic defects that might be in the wine. So we need to have a kind of a ratio of opening diameter to widest diameter that approaches one, but obviously is less than one. So, the glass is still curved. So not too large, not too small. 8 to 10 or 11, or even 12 ounces maximum and enough to contain a 1 to 2-ounce pour and give you plenty of room to swirl and plenty of space to fit your nose in. One more important piece of glass architecture is the fact that the glass has a stem. That's pretty important for it to have a stem, so that I can hold the glass by the stem, there by not having my hand in the way of the glass. I can look at the wine. I can easily swirl the wine. If I need to, I can actually set the glass down on the flat surface and draw circle with the base and that swirl it without spilling. Some people are less capable of swirling than others. Also, my hand is not touching the bowl and I'm securing the wine or warming it up. If I want to warm the wine up, all I have to do is grab it like this and swirl it a little bit and then hold it by the stem again. Stemless glasses are available. But again, I have hold it like this. So, I may be unintentionally warming up the line or smudging up the glass. I think I mentioned bowl jars in the beginning. These are actually fantastic drinking vessels, but not really good for wine evaluation. So we need a clear glass not necessarily to have crystal, but clear glass. Avoid tinted glass. Avoid glasses with logos. Avoid cut glass. Although if you're at your aunt Mildred's house and she brings out her fine cut crystal, you will smile and enjoy it and make no comment. [LAUGH] But for sensory evaluation, we're going to use this type of glass. And in a moment, I'm going to pour a flood of these glasses and show you how it look. Another really important thing to say is that when you're evaluating a flight of wines, every glass in your set should be identical. They should be the exact same glass not different sizes or shapes, or capacities. Because since we know that glasses deliver aromatics differently, each glass can give you a different incorrect impression of the wine that's in that glass. Another very important thing is to have similar pour height or pour amount. So for example, if you're using ten-ounce glass like this and you're pouring one ounce. Make sure you pour one ounce of each wine in each of the glasses in the flight. That's very, very important. Just one simply reason would be that if you're tasting red wines, a greater amount of liquid can look darker. And when in fact, the wine is not any darker than the wine next to it. I can pour the same wine in five glasses for you, giving you a half ounce more in each glass. And color wise and intensity wise, it would look like five different wines. So the same amount of pour is very, very important. I've brought a set of five, ten-ounce wine tasting glasses to show you how important an even pour is. If you have a look at these glasses, remember I said, they contain about ten ounces and I've put a one ounce pour in each glass. So in fact, this is all the same wine and just to prove that uniformity of pour is important. As I look at all of these wines, they're exactly the same color and they're exactly the same density as they should be since they came out on the same bottle, but I know I've got a good even pour and I haven't pour the heavy amount which would exaggerated color that's not really there. So I'm assuming that you can see these all and I'll pick up a glass and swirl it for you to show you no matter how hard I swirl, that wine doesn't want to walkout of the glass. And if I'm a poor swirler, I might put it down and draw a circle on the surface of the table with my glass and then boom. At this point, I'd like to give you your first class assignment. Go out and buy some wine glasses. It's important to have a good set of glasses. It's important, as I've already said that they all be the same. I'd like to have your glasses be between 8 and 10, 11 or 12 ounces at the most and you should be able to find these glasses relatively easily by searching online. I searched online to see what you'd be seeing and I found a lot of suitable wine glasses that were anywhere from 2 to 3 or $4 per stem. I think you're going to probably need about six glasses for this class. But if it's affordable, why not buy about a dozen? I know I break them once in a while myself. And so, it's just nice to have a set. If you want to have one or two other people taste with you and if you bought a dozen, you'd have enough for everybody to have the exact same glass for tasting. So, go ahead and see what you can find. Please don't spend a fortune. Remember that they should be clear glass. You'll see the ISO glasses online and you'll see many other glasses both lead crystal or unleaded crystal that are about the same size, and shape. And again, the most important thing is that they be not too big and that they be uniform, so you can use all the same glasses for a particular tasting. See you back soon.
