750Daily: Science Behind Wineglass Shape

Interesting article in 750Daily, as linked by WineTerroirist:
WineglassScience
to the (precious little) science behind wineglass shapes. So take that, GeorgReidel.

Having taken one of the Reidel Seminars at SFW&CF, I don’t deny that the shape of the glass can have an impact on the aromatics of a wine, sometimes dramatically so. But I never found that a Chianti served in a Chianti glass was “better” than served in a Tazzalenghe glass…just different.

As for taste, I was never able to pick up any taste differences from the different glasses. As the article debunks:

…a model that seems to have been based on a misunderstanding of research reported in the early 20th century. Contemporary science tends to agree that perceptual differences are minimal from one part of the tongue to another.

For my case, my Reidel Skippy PeanutButter jar seems to work just fine.
Tom

I read the article and could not agree more. Could there be minute differences between the glasses? Of course - and I do believe that Reidel et al truly believe that their variety-specific glasses do make a difference. But is there enough of a difference to ‘require’ you to go out and get one of each? Of course not . . .

In all honesty, it would not be easy to ‘double check’ the science here because of the myriad of factors that come into flavors and aromas - and the fact that humans are ‘imperfect’ at best. You can do head space analysis on the wines in the glasses and you can do plenty of ‘tasting’ panels, but this is still far from ‘exact’.

When looking at getting new glasses fro my tasting room, I had the same wine poured into two sizes of the Schott Zweisel Pure Tritan glasses and asked a number of folks to smell one and then the other. I switched up which glass was smelled first - either the Sauv Blanc or the Cab - and in nearly every case, whichever glass was smelled first was preferred . . . and it didn’t matter if there was red or white in there.

Cheers.

Larry - that’s about as much “science” as goes into these glasses anywhere. And you had a relatively random set of visitors - some who “know” all about glass shape and some who just realized there’s a difference between red and white wines sometimes. I’d be surprised if your findings weren’t pretty much universal.

And the writer pretty much misquotes Shepherd because smell, as in sniffing from a glass, provides relatively little influence on how we taste. More importantly however, the whole concept of a glass for a specific variety is pretty stupid IMO, if you believe that there are differences in terroir and wine making. To say that a particular glass highlights one specific grape no matter where it’s grown or when it’s picked or who turns it into wine - that’s flat out dumb.

It would mean that if you grow Syrah on top of a high hill on a north slope in the far west of Sonoma, or in a sunny flat valley in Kansas, or on the cliffs of the Mediterranean, or near the Alps in Austria or in the Barossa Valley or the southern end of Argentina it’s so similar that the same glass will be best in all cases. If that’s true, the shape of the glass would be pretty irrelevant because those wines will have very little in common. And if you put ten percent Grenache or Viognier in the blend? Are the glass shapes supposed to “work” as long as the main variety makes up 80% of the final blend? 75%?

A nothing article rehashing old news, courtesy of 750.

Gasp…I can’t believe you said that, Greg. Tell us how you really feel. [snort.gif]

Hate to tell you this, Greg, but they grow world-class Syrah in those sunny Kansas valleys!! [snort.gif]
Tom

Very interesting. I am going to try this at home.

Well-stated, Greg.

I was with you for most of your post, but . . . . huh?

…and that hold-your-nose experiment works with wine too - at least it did for me.

Larry, that’s consistent with what I’ve said in every one of these threads over the years: I don’t believe there’s a big difference in what we smell (and none in what we taste) with different glass shapes. And when people try to compare glass shapes, they forget that the first one they smell is always going to seem stronger, because the aroma receptors are the least saturated at that point. To do a proper comparison, I believe you need to wait minutes between samples, and even then you’d have to do dozens of A/B comparisons to build up any meaningful statistics. Someone smelling one glass, then 10 seconds later smelling another tells you almost nothing.

Usually panelists are forced to wait at least 1 minute between samples. It it does take a lot of repetitions to build up appropriate statistics, to be sure.

Greg, I know you’re the most informed on this topic, thanks for chiming in. Do you know what the typical recovery time is for aroma receptors?

BTW, here’s an interesting article I stumbled on that pretty much debunks the myth that “90% of what we taste is smell”, or at least clarifies that there is not very good science backing up that statement - and, most importantly, that no matter what the “number” might be it is almost certainly highly variable depending on what the substance is we are tasting.

I think the “recovery period” is concentration-dependent and chemical-dependent, as well as if the compound is irritating or not or has some other interactions - so I don’t think there is a fixed time

The 90% of taste is smell “debunking” has a lot to do with how you define taste. If strictly defined, aroma has little to do with taste - it will interact with the taste interpretation of the response on the tongue, but not much. If you take the more colloquial meaning of taste (flavor), then the aroma has a large contribution. In other words, aroma is not a large part of sweetness (on the tongue) but is a major factor in chocolate flavor.

Neal - the article didn’t go far enough.

I think people usually misunderstand what’s going on. When we sniff with our nose, like a dog, we pick up what we call smells or aromas. That’s nice. Dogs are somewhere on the order of hundreds of times better at picking up smells and rodents are also considerably better at it than humans.

Then those smells go to the olfactory bulb and get connected to various nerve endings that branch out to different parts of the brain, enabling us to distinguish between the various subtle differences between white flowers and yellow flowers, as we read in tasting notes. Rodents beat out both dogs and humans when it comes to that.

But what do we smell? Whatever it is has to be volatile so our receptors can pick it up. Salt doesn’t really have a smell because it isn’t particularly volatile. But smell doesn’t stop when we put something in our mouths. We pick up a lot of information, in fact a lot more information, via retronasal “smelling”, as they describe in the article. Those aromas from inside our mouths combine with the tastes we’re picking up and those all combine with our emotional reactions and the tactile sensations we’re picking up from the nerve endings on our tongues and mouths, and of course taste receptors are not exclusively found on our tongues, and we’ve changed the chemistry of the wine as we’ve combined it with saliva, and all that information goes to our brain and creates a pattern that’s exactly like a visual pattern. It’s why we can remember the faces of our friends, the front door to our house, and the taste of a Riesling. In our brain we taste various flavors because we’re combining the information from taste buds and retronasal aromas into a single thing since it all comes from within our mouths.

It’s why the other Greg says aroma has a lot to do with chocolate. Actually it has a lot to do with much of our food and wine.But it has very little to do with sniffing the glass, although that does help get the rest of the senses ready.

And at that point, humans have a sensory system that is vastly superior to dogs and rodents. A dog picks up a lot of smells but they don’t really mean anything emotionally - dogs pretty much just gulp down whatever they’re eating. A rodent may have a preference for one thing or another, perhaps more than dogs do, but that’s it. With humans, the nerve endings head over to the cerebral cortex and not just to one location, but all over. That’s what makes the patterns we call flavors. And some nerves simply bypass the olfactory bulb entirely and head into the part of the brain responsible for emotions. So humans have a far greater appreciation and involvement with their food than dogs and mice, and it’s a combination of sight, aroma, taste, and emotion that other animals don’t seem to get.

All in spite of, not because of, the shape of the glass.

Greg,

Thanks for that. Very educational!

I am not sure how much we disagree. Based on my rudimentary understanding of the science, mostly confirmed by your post, smell is an absolutely essential component in what we taste. Taste buds are pretty rudimentary; we depend on smell to add a lot of the nuance of which we are capable.

Whether, how, and how much the shape of a glass impacts what we sniff (as opposed to taste) a wine is a different, open question. I tend to think it does have an impact that can be rather significant. What I smell of a champagne from a flute is different, qualitatively and quantitatively, from what the same wine smells like from a white wine glass.

But if your bottom line is that the notion of a “chianti glass” or any grape/site-specific glass is marketing bullshit, I quite agree.

Is the “sunny flat valley in Kansas” near the town of Oxymoron? Sorry for the digression from an interesting thread, but someone has to uphold this board’s standards of pedantry.

Awesome!

Absolutely an oxymoron and I hang my head in shame and despair.

It’s an astute and wise observation Mike. In my defense, weak though it may be, I did drive through Kansas once and I thought I felt a slight elevation on one road, although to be sure, that may have been wishful thinking.

Well done.

And for the less enlightened - the ability to distinguish between yellow and white flowers was a bit of sarcasm thrown in for kicks.

Hey, the Kansas Mountains can be treacherous!

Baloney, Greg…Kansas is not nearly as flat as Iowa/Nebraska/Oklahoma and other mid-west states.
The eastern part, near Manhattan/Topeka have the beautiful rolling hills called the FlintHills.
Beautiful scenery populated by very special people…farm folk…salt of the earth…but they don’t drink (much) wine.
Tom

Well, I’m not sure where to go with that. First of all, for an easterner, Oklahoma is western. At least whatever you can see of it through the swirling red dust. It never seems to go anywhere and your best bet, should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself in it is to head out of it. In one direction or another. I know that looking at a map, it seems more central, but this “western” movie pretty much clinches the argument over whether it’s western or not: The Oklahoma Kid (1939) - IMDb

I mean, was there ever a movie genre called “midwestern”?

Kansas does rise from the east to the west but that’s because it’s on the eastern side of the continental divide. So OK, the topography isn’t flat. Let’s call it a plane. Which is a lucky thing because it’s part of the Great Plains.

Neal has provided a clear illustration that the people are indeed special, so with the two sages of the forum in agreement, and with the knowledge that Kansas is where Dorothy came from well in mind, we can all concede that the people are very special.

Talking about the east, I’d like to point out that Manhattan and Topeka are pretty far apart. You have to go through New Jersey and then through the Appalachian Mountains, and maybe the Allegheny Mountains. For western folk, everything back east probably seems the same, but it’s not really. That’s like saying near Witchita/Hoboken.

Iowa is of course, one of the “I” states. They’re more or less interchangeable. In south Indiana in Brown County they do start getting some hills and rock quarries, but if you don’t like corn, you don’t have a lot to see otherwise.

Most importantly though, if the people don’t drink much wine, we don’t really care about them, do we?

Anyway, that’s my shorthand take on geography.