Wine: An Explanation
Wine seems to be the only drink that comes with a set of rules. If I take a $10 craft beer and pour it into a solo cup no one bats an eye, but if I do the same thing to a glass of Barefoot wine people look at me like I’m crazy. I use to think this was just the wine industry trying to make themselves seem fancier than they are. “I don’t need a glass bowl on a stick to enjoy a box of Franzia alright you pretentious hipsters!” I’d yell out as I drank alone in my room on a Tuesday night.
This was before I started to actually study wine with the WSET. As I studied and actually drank wine the way it was meant to be drunk I found that those subtle variations in glassware weren’t just so wine people could look down their nose at you if you accidentally grabbed a Bordeaux glass instead of a Burgundy glass when drinking a Pinot Noir. Believe it or not, wine people (also known as oenophiles) are not assholes… Well, some of us are, but one isn’t a prerequisite for the other.
The reason we drink from specific glasses is actually kind of scientific. No one will argue that wine isn’t all about sensory pleasure. The color of a deep Cabernet Sauvignon is the color that I want to paint my kitchen, the smell is what I want as a cologne, and the taste is why I have a budding alcohol problem. Each specific glass is designed to enhance these attributes in a wine: Red wine gets a large bulb which allows the wine to come into contact with a lot of air and develop the tastes and aromas. White wine gets a medium sized glass in order to gather and direct the fresh fruit flavors of the wine. Sparkling wines get a narrow flute in order to let the bubbles slowly (I can’t think of another word besides this one) bubble out. Fortified wine is gross, and the small glass limits how much of the high alcohol wine you can drink at once. Each glass is designed to increase your pleasure while drinking it.
Temperature is also something that I hear people complaining about quite a bit. “I want to drink a cold red wine! Why is white wine the only wine that you can put ice into?!” The answer to that is you can’t put ice into white wine that will dilute the alcoh- I mean flavor. You drink wine at specific temperatures again to increase the experience. Red wines are better at 54 – 59 degrees otherwise they will seem too thin (cold) or muddled (warm). White is better chilled at 45 – 50 degrees or they will not be as fresh as they could be. And Sparkling wines should be well chilled at 43 – 45 degrees in order to keep them bubbles in, fam. Also while we’re on the subject: don’t shoot off sparkling wine corks. Just don’t do it. Worst case scenario you hit someone in the face, best case scenario the wine bubbles out the top and then you lose wine! What you should do is tilt the bottle at a 30-degree angle, hold the cork, and gently turn the bottle. The cork should come out with a soft pfft that according to sommeliers (and I swear this is true) in no louder than a nun’s fart. See we aren’t all stuffy aristocrats living out of touch in our ivory towers! We make fart jokes! Ha… farts…
I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I feel like it's important so I'm gonna reiterate it now: Wine people are not assholes! Especially Sommeliers (pronounced somm-el-yay)! We are people who have dedicated our lives to learning about wine and spirits. It's really not that different from someone dedicating their life to some other passion, be it painting, music, math, science, literature, etc. The difference is simple: People have a predisposition to thinking that they know about wine. "I've seen the movie Somm and I once splurged on a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon at a restaurant that cost almost $50 dollars! I know a thing or two about wine." And you know what maybe you do, but you probably don't know as much as the person who has been studying for years and worked their way up from a cellar worker to someone on the floor of the restaurant you're working at. That's like going to the Doctor and telling them that you can't possibly have lupus because you've watched every episode of House and it was never lupus! Except for that one time it was lupus... That might not actually be a one to one comparison, but you know what I mean. People who work with wine aren't trying to belittle you, in fact if they share any information with you they probably think it's cool and just want to share the gift of learning!
"Alright there is one more wine thing that still makes no sense," I hear you say to your computer screen. "Why do I need to decant my wine? I'm not stuffy! I don't care if my wine is coming out of a artisanal glass vase or whatever those glorified pitchers are!" I hear you, and I understand your frustration, now let me tell you why you're wrong. I'd say 75% of wine doesn't need to be decanted. There's two main reasons that you would decant wine: It's old or it may need to aerated just a bit. Old wines can have sediment in them, especially red wines. this doesn't mean that the wine is bad, but actually may be the cause of color pigment bonding with tannins and falling out of solution. The way to rid the wine of these is decanting! What you do is light a candle (it can really be any source of light, but common a candle just feels more classic), let all the sediment settle to the bottom of the glass, and slowly pour the wine into the decanter using the candle to see through the glass and make sure none of the sediment gets into your wine glass. when the sediment reaches the neck of the bottle stop pouring. Finally, some wine just needs to be aerated. Is it going to hurt if you don't decant those wines? Probably not if you swirl it you should aerate it enough, but sometimes you're just feelin fance and want to drink with a decanter... Of course it becomes a bit less fance when you're pouring it into a plastic wine glass because you've broken too many glass wine glasses and your friends no longer trust you with a big boy wine glass... Jerks
Look, I really don’t care what kind of glass or what temperature you’re drinking your wine at. You could drink Chardonnay straight from the bottle at 70 degrees for all I care. The point of the fancy glasses and the specific temperatures is to enhance your experience with wine. That is the job of any sommelier or frankly anyone in the industry. Now, that being said, if invite you over for a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon I don’t care what you normally do, you’re drinking that out of a Bordeaux glass at precisely 53 degrees Fahrenheit after it has been decanted for no less than half an hour! And no you can’t get an ice cube!
