Love the discussion and the passion. But I also see some “conventional wisdom”, and maybe incorrect assumptions about what happens in a glass of wine.
I’ll link back to a similar discussion where some of these points were raised last year, and the contention made that the majority of a wine’s aroma contributes to taste through the retronasal effect, and even that to a greater degree through what we pick up through exhaling after swallowing:
My biggest objection to these glass comparisons is that they aren’t controlled in any way, and they almost certainly don’t account for the fact that smell and taste receptors get saturated and need time to recover, which they probably haven’t done when people compare wines in different glasses (as an aside, also an objection to the way most professional reviewers taste wine - too fast, without their palates being able to recover between wines, but that’s for a different thread). If you have any doubt about this, next time you have a corked wine, try coming back and smelling it 10 or 20 seconds later and see if it seems as corked as it did on the first whiff.
Then, some elementary geometry: look at the average glass, and you’ll see that the diameter of the opening is typically about proportional to the diameter of the surface of the wine when filled “properly” (whatever that means, and remember that you aren’t keeping the glass filled as you drink it, so the surface area is changing). This means that the surface-to-volume ratio in a glass depends mainly on the height of the bowl, independent of glass shape - which is a little counterintuitive relative to how we think about surface-to-volume as objects increase in size (it goes up linearly with size), because in this case we only have the one liquid surface, not the entire object. The Gabriel (below on the left) and Zalto (center) have about the same ratios of diameter at wine level to diameter at opening (I also included the Zalto Burg glass for comparison). The conclusion I draw is that the ratio of glass volume to wine surface is about the same for the Gabriel and Zalto glasses. Given that, I can’t see how the two should be very different in comparing aroma.
What does that mean? if you just pour a glass and let it sit there, whatever volatile compounds there are will evaporate from the surface and diffuse into the space above the liquid. Some compounds will evaporate faster than others. Some will diffuse up through the air space faster than others (and not necessarily faster than the fast evaporating compounds). BTW, that diffusion from the liquid surface up to the opening can take minutes for the average compound, and it can vary by factors of 2 or 3 or more across the variety of molecular sizes and compositions (that just means that some compounds will reach the opening faster than others).
There are lots of other factors that are hard to model: most of the time we aren’t just leaving a glass to sit for minutes before taking a sip; we swirl the wine, which pushes the liquid around, which pushes the air space around, which moves aroma compounds around and encourages air from outside to get in. I think there is a misconception about what happens in the glass, i.e., people believe that the volatile compounds are rushing out of the glass like air out of a balloon, so having a large volume and a small opening is somehow beneficial in containing those compounds. That’s not a good description at all. The compounds are very slowly evaporating and diffusing up to fill the bowl, and when you stick your nose in you smell what’s managed to make it to that height at that point in time. If you take a whiff right after pouring, you’re not getting the larger, less volatile, slower moving compounds (of which, BTW, TCA is one), you’re getting the smaller, faster, more volatile compounds like VA, SO2, small sulfur compounds, etc. Not the larger flavor esters that give a wine it’s positive aromas.
There is no question (in my own experience) that glass “shape” affects our perception of the aroma of a wine. But my own hypothesis is that shape itself has less to do with it, and height is a principal factor. I actually think you’ll experience more aroma from a smaller, shorter glass than from a larger taller glass.
But again, I contend that the aroma contributing to what we taste is not so much what we smell before taking a sip, as it is what volatizes in the mouth, throat, and airway as we swish and swallow. And as always, drink from whatever glass gives you the most enjoyment