That would be incorrect. There is not enough glycerol in a well made wine to noticeably affect the body. And it definitely is not responsible for “legs.” This subject has come up enough times (on other forums) that I have captured my responses:
There is not (or should not be, at any rate) enough glycerine in wine to have any significant effect on mouthfeel or flavor. It definitely is NOT the source of tears/legs on the side of your wine glass. This phenomenon is called the Gibbs-Marangoni effect, here is a simple explanation
http://www.chem.com.au/science/everyday/drink/
Years ago, Scientific American did a nice article on the nature and science of wine tears, but I have never had success finding it when searching recently.
Glycerol is the chemical name for the 3-carbon tri-alcohol HOCH2CH(OH)CH2OH. Glycerine is the more common generic name for this compound in its impure commercial form. The notion that glycerine is a significant component of wine, and lends properties to some wines such as flavor, viscosity, or mouthfeel, is (from everything I’ve been able to find in the scientific wine literature), simply unfounded. But many wine lovers continue to believe otherwise, partly due to laziness on the part of some wine critics in being a little more technically accurate in their descriptors. BTW, a related compound with one less hydroxyl group, the di-alcohol propylene glycol, is what you mix with water to make common antifreeze.
And from this UC Davis web site: Glycerol
“No positive relationship between glycerol per se and the mouth-feel attributes of wine has yet been established … Furthermore, at the concentrations at which glycerol is normally found in wine, the impact that it could have on the viscosity of wine would probably not be perceived by even the most experienced tasters (Noble & Bursick, 1984). Against this background it is quite possible that the perceived contribution of glycerol to mouth-feel can easily be over-emphasized.”
This summary actually appears to have been taken from a much longer article describing a South African study. Though it’s a bit dry this article is well worth reading for anyone interested in the impact of glycerol in wine. For those who don’t want to labor through the entire article, the take home message is: the vast majority of dry wines fall into a fairly narrow range of glycerol concentration, with little difference between white and red, and NO correlation between concentration and quality as measured by award of gold/silver/bronze medals. The average concentration of glycerol is not nearly high enough to have any impact on the perceived viscosity of dry wines, though it may add a slight bit of perceived sweetness.
From another article (referenced in the above study): “at levels at which glycerol is normally found in wine, from 1.0 to 9.0 g/L, its primary contribution to the sensory properties of wine is to sweetness. Further, in the wine used in this investigation, below a concentration of 25.8 g/L, glycerol does not produce a detectable increase in perceived viscosity”
But “legs” or “tears” have nothing at all to do with glycerol concentration. One bit of information to consider: the vapor pressure of water at 20 degrees C is about 17 Torr; ethanol about 44 Torr; Glycerol somewhere around 0.001 Torr. The point being that while water and alcohol have some modest tendency to evaporate at room temperature, glycerol does not.
