Wine glass
A wine glass is a special drinking vessel made of glass , the only wine is used.
Early drinking vessels, which often only served a specific purpose, are, for example, from ancient Egypt for the period between 2660 and 2160 BC. Chr. Handed down. The shape and design of the wine glasses were determined through the centuries by the possibilities of glass production, tradition and contemporary taste, and from the 18th century onwards by the refined table culture. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that questions about the physiology of wine drinking came to the fore, combined with the shape of the glasses.
Table culture in the 18th and 19th centuries century
With the growing demands of the table culture that developed in the 18th century, the decorative design of wine glasses became increasingly important. The resulting need for jewelry among broad strata of the population lasted until the mid-1920s and was reflected in a wide range of table sets and individual services for certain drinks. Wine glasses were artistically painted, cut, engraved, etched and gilded. With Art Déco , the functional forms discussed since the turn of the century finally prevailed, and decors were obsolete .
Glass design in the 20th century
A wine glass consists of the goblet ( kuppa ), i.e. the upper part into which the wine is poured, the stem and a foot to put down. A long stem prevents the wine from heating up in the hand. According to the experience from wine tasting, the shape of the goblet has an influence on which taste buds the wine appeals more strongly and whether the taste sensation is influenced more by the acidity, the fruity melt or the sweetness.
The Austrian entrepreneur and glass designer Claus Josef Riedel (1925–2004) was one of the first to deal with questions about the function of glass, about the interplay between glass and the character of the wine . Today's creative principles of glass design are largely based on his considerations and drafts. The shape of the glass should, for example, reflect the character of the wine and create the prerequisites for a reliable assessment of the color and purity of the wine.
Glasses for degustation and professional tasting
The sample glasses occupy a special position among the glasses. These colorless wine tasting glasses, standardized according to ISO 3591, are reminiscent of small white wine glasses or sherry glasses. As before you can still see the small "wine tasting cups" with printed motifs; they are popular souvenirs and collectibles. With fill quantities of 0.1 or 0.05 liters, a normal bottle (0.7 or 0.75 liters) is sufficient for seven or 15 equally large sample portions.
Special wine glasses are also available for tasting , i.e. evaluating the characteristic features of a wine such as B. Clarity, color, viscosity, smell, taste, acidity, body, aroma, bouquet and age. The most famous of the glasses used for this is of French origin and bears the name l'Impitoyable , the incorruptible . The goblet of this glass is tightly closed and sharply focused, which directs the odorous substances of the wine into the nose. In this way the specialist can recognize even the smallest wine defects .
Handling wine and glasses
Wine glasses should not be filled more than halfway. It is therefore advisable to have the wine served in a jug or, better still, in a carafe in restaurants, for example . The bouquet can only unfold in a glass in which there is enough air space above the wine level.
When assessing the content, the glass is swiveled, i.e. set in motion around the vertical with slight circular movements, in order to let the wine wet the free inner surface of the goblet. On this ventilated glass surface, the smell is created, which the nose picks up. A glass that is too full has too little of this free glass surface, which falsifies the "nose impression". Due to its more open-pored material properties, lead crystal offers the wine a larger wetting surface from the outset and allows it to adhere more strongly to the glass wall than with crystal glasses. This plays a noticeable role for the perception through the nose, because the wine evaporates more intensely on the glass wall of a lead crystal glass.
A certain influence on the taste experience is also assigned to the edge of the glass; it should be thin and perfectly sanded, i.e. not too thick or rounded (rolled edge). The optimal rim ensures that the wine quickly and evenly wets the surface of the tongue. It also helps to dose the wine in as small sips as possible.
Furthermore, the wine glass should not be touched by the stomach, but only by the stem, so that the temperature of the wine does not increase due to the warmth of the hand. The glasses should be about the temperature that is right for the wine, 8 to 10 ° C for white wine and 15 to 17 ° C for red wine. The wall should be just thick enough that different temperatures of the wine glass have no noticeable influence on the wine. Otherwise the wine will either become too warm or the glass will cloud over, so that the visual assessment options will suffer.
When drinking sparkling wines, you should avoid the flat bowls that are often used because the carbon dioxide escapes too quickly due to the large surface area of the liquid. Another, often neglected aspect in this context is the targeted perlage . In addition, a small error, the so-called mousse point , is deliberately created on the inside of sparkling wine and champagne glasses during production . The carbonic acid bubbles settle at the cast point or a sanded point off the central axis and rise up as a string of fine bubbles.
Manufacturing
Nowadays, wine glasses are mostly made by machine.
In blow molding machines, a closed glass tube, heated up to the molding temperature, is fed into a mold that can be divided and the mold is filled from the inside using compressed air at the cold end of the tube, then inflated. The wall thickness decreases with increasing diameter because the volume or the mass of molten glass is constant. The mold splits and the hot, machine-blown glass is removed. The remaining top balloon is cracked all around and knocked off. The edge that is sharp from the chipping is remelted and thus deburred.
This mechanical production technique is mostly recognizable by the longitudinal seams along the handle and the foot; mostly only in the calyx area or the visible area is the wall thickness of the seam evened out by remelting.
A wine glass is also handcrafted by pressure and blowing, but by a glassblower at the so-called glassmaker's pipe . Without a shape for the outer contour, it is up to the skill and experience of the glassblower to shape the goblet through targeted heating and pressure build-up with the mouth. This mouth-blown manufacturing technique is much more complex and generates more rejects. That is why hand-blown glasses are much more expensive. The material usage costs also play a major role: the usual lead crystal glasses are considerably more complex to extract the material.
Many companies make wine glasses. The price ranges from a few cents to over 150 euros for a sommelier wine glass as one-off production.
See also: glass manufacturing .
See also
Regional wine glasses:
literature
- Marlene Reidel: Happiness with Glass - From the beer bottle to the magnificent vase. Mosaik-Verlag, Grafenau 1988, ISBN 3-87553-325-9 , p. 118.
Web links
- Walter Spiegl: The wine glass through the ages (PDF file; 1.34 MB)