We all have pet peeves. Having spent most of my adult life involved in the food & wine industry, you can probably guess the subject matter of mine. Here are just a few, but they only apply if you’re serious about your food and wine!
1. Don’t cook with sub-standard ingredients. If you want good food, use good stuff to make it!
2. Pet Peeve #1 includes wine. Crappy wine is not an excuse to pour it into the pot. If you wouldn’t drink it, why would you want to put it in your food?
3. If a wine (or meal) doesn’t measure up to your expectations…move on!
And…here’s one that’s particularly troubling – and that I run into all too often (my good friend Peter & I are both snobs about this).
4. Serve your wine in quality glasses!
That last one is the real topic of this posting. YES, PROPER GLASSWARE DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
Whether you’re a serious home cook, or a quality restaurant, there is no excuse for using poor quality glasses to serve fine wine. You don’t have to buy $50 per stem famous name crystal. There is affordable stemware that is quality stuff.
If you don’t believe there’s a difference, I would challenge you to take a test. Get yourself a couple of quality glasses (you can borrow them if you don’t want to spend the money before you take the test). You might want to have some friends take the test with you – if you already think your heavy clunker libby glassware doesn’t make a difference, your palate is probably biased. Enlist a few friends with discriminating palates. Pour the same wine blind for them into two glasses…one the clunker, one a good glass. If the result doesn’t convince you, then I give up…but I suspect you will be convinced.
Good food should be served with an attractive place setting. That’s obvious. However, a place setting doesn’t change the way the food tastes…just the way it appears. That’s not true with glassware. It really DOES make a difference – both in appearance and in the way the wine tastes. The right shaped bowl affects the way the aromas collect & improves them. It also allows you to “swirl” the wine without spilling, giving the wine the proper aeration…improving both the nose and the palate of the wine.
Don’t get me started on “stemless” glasses…if you’re serving your wine at the correct temperature, do you really want to warm it up with your sweaty palms? Heating up the wine releases the alcohol, making an otherwise good wine seem “hot” – among other problems. For the same reason (unless a wine is too cold, & needs to be warmed), always hold your glass by the stem or base, not by the bowl.
And then…what’s with all the different shaped wine glasses? That’s a subject for another day. Suffice it to say that some wines taste better in specific glass shapes. If you don’t have the budget (or storage space) for multiple glasses for different wine varieties, then a good all-purpose Bordeaux-style wine glass will work well for most wines…so long as it is a quality glass with a good shape (closing in a little at the top, to capture the aromas & allow for swirling).
I think it’s OK to be a snob…when it makes a difference!