How do you know if a bartender or a waiter for that matter, appreciates his/her job? Simple; you do the wine glass test. Anyone in the restaurant/club/cafe business knows that serving wine is a procedure with strict rules because wine tastes differently in different types of glasses. And what’s the biggest mistake that could be done? Serving red in tall, sleek and fragile-looking white wine glasses and the opposite, of course. Even though it’s fairly easy to simply neglect that fact sometimes because both red and white are wines, that simply can’t be an excuse. It can be for wine dummies like me and you, but not for someone who serves to please in the area.

So, how important is the wine glass? In short – a lot. Starting with the fact that wine is the kind of drink that has attitude of its own, the glass in which it gets served will determine its behaviour in terms of structure, texture and smell. Moreover, the glass is responsible for holding the taste of all the various types of wines, which ultimately means that it determines the intensity of the wine’s aroma that reaches your mouth.

Judging by how wine glasses work, it’s a no brainer that you have to have a set of white wine glasses as well as one for red wine, especially if you’re an owner of a restaurant/club/cafe. You aim to please, remember? In case you’re still not convinced in this, rather esoteric matter, here’s a short simplification of the mysterious ways wine glasses work.

The glass affects the aroma of the wine

Wine as a drink has its own aroma with a very large spectre of nuances. After all, it’s a drink made of grapes, so it’s natural. And just as your desire for food increases as you smell it (think of bacon, or a freshly baked bread) the same happens with wine. The thing here is that wine evaporates once poured in the glass, and that’s exactly when the aroma reaches your smelling senses. However, the trick is in the glass; if the surface area created by the liquid isn’t big enough, the aromas of the wine will evaporate fairly quickly without you feeling them. Therefore, the larger the surface area, the slower the volatilization. In this particular case, it’s the reason why white wine glasses are slightly wider in the middle of the bowl and the wine is poured exactly to that point.

The form of the glass helps the collection of aromas

The aroma collector is the space in the bowl of the wine glass that remains empty, just above the surface area. That’s the space where aromas are to be kept before they reach your nose. Now, the wider the glass is in the middle, the better the collection of aromas is, so according to the type of wine you’ll be drinking, you may want to taste more of the aromas, or less. White wine glasses mainly have small aroma collectors in order to maintain temperature, whereas red wine glasses have a lot larger bowls for showcasing their aromas.

Finally, the ‘thin lip’ phenomenon

The term thin lip really exists in the science of wine glasses. It refers to how thin is the glass as that determines the drinking experience. The thinner the glass, the more your senses concentrate on the wine and its taste. This also goes for other glasses, such as those for whiskey or martini.