Drink This Now Lesson 2

 The second lesson of Drink This Now was about choice of glassware and how it can effect the behavior of the wine you are drinking. The experiment done for the lesson proceeded as follows:

1. Make a selection of glassware, this experiment was performed with a shot glass, a whiskey glass, a pint glass, a wine glass, and a regular glass which featured a mild curve.

2. Using the shot glass to measure, pour one shot of chilled wine into each glass.

3. Smell the wine from each glass, giving one minute between each glass to clear your nose and consider the effects of the glassware on how the wine expressed itself.

This lesson helped prove some concepts about glassware that I hadn't quite bought into yet. Particularly that a good wine glass can make a big difference in how a wine tastes. The smell was incredibly muted or hardly even present in some glasses compared to the wine glass. In particular, the pint glass gave the wine almost no chance to express any kind of scent due to the distance it had to travel. Even in the shot glass it was very difficult to detect a scent well because the glass had no mechanism to focus the smell. Before I thought wine glasses were largely a marketing ploy, but they make a considerable difference.

The wine used for the experiment was an Airfield Viognier from Oregon. It was chilled for the suggested 45 minutes before the experiment. Out of the wine glass it was very expressive, and had noticeable peach and apple scents, but these were very difficult to pick up out of the other glasses.