Have a crystal realize wine tastes different?

It is a popular belief that the glass you use to earn a good wine is almost as important to your enjoyment of the drink as the wine itself. The shape, color and texture of the wine glasses are all likely to affect the way you appreciate the taste and aroma of a wine. Whether there really is some truth in this or not is still uncertain, but there are some convincing arguments that a wine does taste better when drunk out of the right glass. 

So how can we know what we need glasses? With thousands of different glasses out there, it's hard to know what would be the best. Most people agree that a specially shaped glass is required for certain types of wine. The most obvious example is tall, thin flute-shaped glass of champagne, which seeks to maintain 'fuzziness' of sparkling wines by reducing the area on top of the tube. A serious wine enthusiast will also use different glasses for red and white wines - a rounder, wider bowl of reds to give more room for wine to breathe and a little smaller, tulip-shaped bowl of white to help keep their refrigerated. 

But some people have taken this theory a lot more. Real wine geeks say that the difference between wines runs much deeper than just the color, and that for each of the different selection of wine is a glass specifically designed to enhance the experience of drinking it. Nobody has taken this further than the Austrian wine glass manufacturer Riedel, the company that first came up with the idea. They produce customized eyeglasses not only for different types of wine, but also for different varieties and vintages within each type - but few people could afford to collect the whole set! 

With regard to what glass is made of, many people believe that a good wine tastes better when drunk from a crystal glass. This is not entirely correct - even to drink from a lead crystal glass is normally considered to be more enjoyable. It's actually more about aroma than the taste, most of what we "taste" when we drink wine, are in fact a combination of its smell and the evaporated flavors in your mouth. Crystal wine glasses, because of their high lead content (for a glass to count as "Crystal" In Europe it has to contain at least 24% lead) has a slightly rougher surface than glass, which helps to release the flavor better by causing friction as the wine moves inside the tube. 

Other than this, the differences are almost entirely aesthetic. A lead crystal glass is clearer, so you can see the wine better, so real tasters to examine its "legs" easier. It is also a lot heavier than glass - again because of the high levels of lead - not to mention the more sparkly and makes nice ring sound when you press it - science aside, crystal is just generally more satisfying to drink from!