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The gift of learning to be a glass artist
When serious wine drinkers get together to taste wines, there are sure to be many glasses on the table. The range of styles and shapes are selected to match the selection of wines.
What is more ubiquitous this holiday season than countless electronic versions of your favorite Christmas carols? How about the equally untold recommendations for your “perfect” Christmas wine?
In case it’s of interest, a recent Google search for “selecting Christmas wines” yielded 9.03 million results in .61 seconds.
I found everything from wines deals to wine clubs to assurances I will pick my “holiday wines like a pro.”
A pro what? A pro wrestler?
As in, trust me, where can you go wrong? Maybe it’s best we don’t tell you all that you might find if you dare to look.
How about a set of “Ugly Christmas Sweater” wine bottle covers complete with Santa Hat bottle toppers, or a Wacky Legs Mrs. Claus bottle topper, or 12 ways to re-use wine bottles for Christmas decorations?
And who can resist the DYI handbook of making Christmas crafts (“beyond easy”) with used wine corks? Well, I can, for one.
There are some sensible gifts for Christmas. The first that comes to mind, given the crowd with which I occasionally tip a glass or two, is better wine glasses, or stemware, as they are known.
The new Riedel Champagne wine glass is shaped less like a traditional flute shape and designers say this allows the wine’s flavors and aromas to open.
“Better,” of course means you can run the gamut, from functional and affordable (Libbey, $20 for four) to super-premium and super-cool (Zalto and Riedel, from around $55 and up).
What’s the difference? Well, for your typical Christmas and Thanksgiving crowd (“I drink wine only on the holidays when it’s served at someone else’s house”), a set of basic (i.e., inexpensive) wine glasses/containers will do.
Millions of gallons of wine have been drunk from all sorts of containers and the only negative might be a hangover or two.
A friend is adamant about drinking her wine from a jelly jar (this is reflective of her choices of wine) and hasn’t yet succumbed to any mysterious diseases. She also doesn’t hold much for the disingenuous “swirl, sniff, sip” canard that sometimes overwhelms the very reason the bottle was opened.
But improving your wine glass can make a difference if your interest in wine is greater than it being simply an alcohol transport system.
So why the many options in wine glasses? So many shapes and sizes but you’ll notice all wine glasses share several traits: A stem to hold it, a bowl that’s wider at the bottom and a small (or nonexistent) rim.
The stem keeps your hands off the bowl, since hands tend to change the serving temperature of the wine and leave fingerprints on the clear glass.
The bigger the bowl the easier you can swirl, letting the wine’s aromas circulate and become evident. You’ll notice glasses for red wines generally have larger bowls than glasses for white wines. Partly this is because red wines need more time and more contact with the air to open and release their aromas.
Francesco Drusian makes world-class Prosecco in Valdobbiadene, Italy, and his choice of glass is not the traditional narrow flute but rather a glass with a wider mouth and rounder bowl. A crystal glass, of course.
Bowl shape and size is a personal choice, and some well-known wine critics use the same style of glass (in many cases a white-wine glass) for all their wine tasting.
Hand-blown (or, more correctly, mouth-blown) glasses tend not to have a rim because of the manufacturing process. No rim means less likely to dribble and it allows the wine to spread evenly onto your tongue.
Today’s highly skilled and innovative glass makers have developed wine-specific glasses with the rim and bowl shaped to direct the liquid onto certain parts of the tongue and palate. (Geek alert:) Related theories hold certain wines reveal their nuances better in specific sections of the mouth.
Regular glass or crystal? The difference between crystal and glass is that crystal may contain a certain amount of lead, which strengthens the glass.
Regular glass is lead-free but is thicker, doesn’t have crystal’s clarity or delicate chime when struck and survives your dishwasher, kids and cats better than crystal.
Lead is used in glass-making because it has a low melting point and thus keeps the glass liquid longer and easier to work with. It also makes the glass stronger, a key component when seeking out the thinnest glass possible.
Some stemware makers (such as Schott Zweisel), aware of concerns about the lead in glassware, now use zinc oxide, barium oxide, or potassium oxide in place of lead.
Crystal stemware is known for its sparkle and feel, having a certain microscopic roughness because of the crystalline structure not found in polished glass.
Crystal wine glasses also are more expensive than regular glass, another reason to handwash.
While lead-free wine glasses, such as those by Riedel and Zalto, are surprisingly durable, they still need special care when being washed and hand-washing is recommended for these and all your better stemware. You can use a machine (I am NOT suggesting this, although some restaurants do it), but make sure the glasses are secure and won’t bounce around.
Stemless wine glasses (or tumblers) are popular today for their casual, unsophisticated manner and functionality. Similar to the discussions between cork and twist-cap closures, there are drinkers who like the tumbler-style glasses and those who prefer the elegance and tradition of stemmed glasses. The stem, as many a server has learned the hard way, is the most-fragile part of a wine glass and where breakage tends most often to happen.
Plastic stemless wine glasses? Save them for camping.
Francesco Drusian: Preserving the heritage of Prosecco DOCG
The steep hills of the unique Valdobbiadene-Conegliano Prosecco Superiore DOCG rise abruptly from the Venetian plain. The border separating the DOCG from Prosecco DOC lies at the base the hills. Story and photos by Dave Buchanan
BIGOLINO di Valdobbiadene (TV) – Standing amidst rows of spring-fresh vines climbing the razorback hills rising steeply to of the pre-Alps of northeast Italy, Francesco Drusian smiles at the thought of this region becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site.
“We did everything we could to preserve our heritage,” Drusian says, reaching out to a light-green shoot just opening to the April sun. “Now, it’s up to others to decide if we did enough.”
It’s only a few days past VinItaly and I’ve called on Francesco Drusian in hopes of learning more about Prosecco and Drusian’s place in the narrative of Italy’s popular yet oft-underappreciated sparkling wine.
I’ll post more about our discussions in the future.
Few people would argue Francesco Drusian has done as much as anyone to preserve his heritage and that of Prosecco.
Born in the hills of Valdobbiadene-Conegliano and 100-percent Glera grapes. Photo courtesy Drusian FaceBook
According to Francesco, he’s the fourth generation of his family (the fifth, his daughter Marika, already is producing Prosecco DOCG under her own label) to make wine from these geometrically perfect vineyards overlooking the village of Bigolino, which itself lies on the north bank of the Fiume Piave near where the river cuts through the famed Valdobbiadene hills.
The winery began in the mid-19th Century with grandfather Giuseppe Drusian and then his son Rino making still wines. Francesco took over in 1984 and today the name Drusian connotes Prosecco Superiore DOCG, one of the best versions of the iconic Italian sparkling wine now soaring on a crest of popularity.
Francesco introduced sparkling wine to his winery in 1986, shortly after the autoclave afforded a way to control the secondary fermentation that gives Prosecco its sparkle and shortly before the world’s love affair with everything Italian became the tsunami we see today.
The advantages of the pressurized autoclave – including preserving bubbles and fresh flavors and reducing the labor and cost involved with metodo classico – suddenly made it possible for lovers of sparkling wine worldwide to enjoy a wine that is light, refreshing, food-friendly and surprisingly affordable.
“Prosecco DOC is the ultimate simple but sophisticated wine which personifies the unique Italian lifestyle” says the Prosecco DOC Consorzio website.
However, the international rush to adopt elements of the “Italian lifestyle” had its expected result: a flood of Prosecco, much of it poorly made and of dubious background (google “Paris Hilton prosecco”), hitting the market.
Even the very existence of a Prosecco DOC gives voice to the expansion, some say uncontrolled, of Prosecco as an industrial product.
By the mid-2000s, Prosecco, as with many other great things, had to be saved from its own success. Read more…
What do you mean, ‘It’s time to go?’ Look at all the wines…
Wine enthusiasts faced a daunting lineup of choices at the Vino 2016 and the Tre Bicchieri International Tour events recently held in New York City.
The plane had barely lifted out of La Guardia, headed west over the snow-covered country of upstate New York, and I already was thinking about the wines I missed during my brief stay in New York City.
Three days of Italian Wine Week/Vino 2016 in New York City’s Midtown Hilton with a brief interlude at the Tre Bicchieri 2016 International Tour tasting simply wasn’t time enough to do justice to all the wines and winemakers at the two events.
One of the expected drawbacks to having 160-plus winemakers and about 1,000 different labels in one room, as was the case with the two Vino 2016 Grand Tastings, is you simply can’t meet every winemaker even with an afternoon to do so.
Prosecco maker Graziano Merotto, shown here pouring at his winery in Col San Martino, this year was awarded his fifth consecutive Tre Bicchieri.
Undoubtedly many gems went untasted or there simply wasn’t time to return to re-taste some of the more-interesting wines. I’m certainly not complaining, given the breadth and depth of the wines I did taste, and there are many worse places to be than surrounded by talented and ambitious winemakers.
It was an abundance of riches including a fascinating seminar about olive oil from Marco Oreggia (a fine article here from Susannah Gold).
The wine-cup-runneth-over was something I mentioned at the Vino 2016 tasting to Marco Funiati, owner and general manager of Agricola Messapica in Salento.
“Yes, there are many (winemakers) here trying to attract the American market,” said Funiata. “We don’t have much time to make an impression, and the American market is so big.”
He was pouring his 2014 Salento Chardonnay, an 80/20 blend of Chardonnay and Verdeca. Crisp, fresh and bright, available in the U.K. but still seeking a U.S. importer.
I stopped a few tables away to try Alex Polencic’s Pinot Grigio and although it hadn’t been in bottle long, was impressed by the rich mouthfeel and velvety apple/pear fruit, far different (and way better) than the sea of plonky Pinot Grigios now flooding the U.S. market.
“2014 was one of the most difficult years in the last 15,” Polencic said. “But 2015 was much better” with late-summer rain softening the earlier heat.
Over at the Tre Bicchieri International Tour tasting at the Metropolitan Pavilion, I slipped through the crowd to find Elvira Bortolomiol pouring her family’s 2014 Brut Prior Prosecco Superiore, the 2014 Brut Lus Naturae and the 2015 Extra Dry Bandarossa. Prosecco sales continue to climb and it’s no wonder after tasting the outstanding wines from Bortolomiol and those Maria Luisa dalla Costa was pouring for Graziano Merotto, both from the rugged hills of the Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG.
This, by the way, was Merotto’s fifth-consecutive Tre Bicchieri, honoring his Cuvèe del Fondatore.
Also of note were the 2014 Lugana Molin and 2014 Lugana Prestige from Cá Maiol on the southern end of Lake Garda. The wines, not surprisingly, were delicious, reflective of the area’s complex history and geography.
And all too quickly the weekend was over.
Wine Openers 