Exhumation of the Rolled Rim Myth

Howdy, Folk. Disclosures: I’m new here, and I’m a wine retailer online. I wrote this short piece for my own newsletter. Comments welcome!

Exhumation of the Rolled Rim Myth

Does a beaded rim on a glass really screw up the way a wine tastes? I think the size of the bowl, for developing aroma, is far, far more important. Here’s why.

Being a modern wine marketer who completely identifies with and understands the Millennials (ahem), I run a few ads on the Facebook. One ad has a picture of a wine glass with a beaded rim, and exhorts the potential customer to “Enjoy your pinot noir even more . . . “. One sharp fellow wrote the comment, “I will, but it certainly won’t be from a glass with a rolled rim, as pictured.”

Aghast at my misstep, I checked – yes, the damn glass in the stock photo had a rolled or beaded rim. It was NOT the perfect wine glass. I could see George Riedel looking down at me with scorn. At his famous stemware seminars where he promotes his admittedly awesome glasses with the perfect shape, all the rims are flat. Why? “"The rim, that rolled edge at the top of the glass, creates turbulence as the wine enters the mouth and spreads the wine across the entire tongue rather than directing it to specific taste areas. Run your fingers around the rim or your wine glass, if it is rolled or you can feel or see a rim, it is not a good glass for wine, regardless of what you paid for it.” This is a comment from a fellow recently indoctrinated by Mr. Riedel.

“Who gives a rat’s ass if there’s a beaded rim?” was my next thought. Consider:

  1. I’ll drink wine from almost any handy vessel if needed. Coffee cups, Miss Piggy souvenir glasses from McDonalds, even straight from the bottle, a la Miles. I can agitate and aerate the wine in my mouth and get excellent results – and often have. Don’t you do the same?

  2. Recent science has shown that all parts of the palate have all the taste buds to taste all the flavors, kind of putting me to shame the idea that certain flavors only impact certain parts of the palate – and by corollary, that a wine glass must direct the wine towards specific taste buds (as if the wine does not shortly end up EVERYWHERE in the mouth and sometimes up the nose). “It turns out that the beloved tongue map many of us learned in school — which shows bitter tastes are detected in the back of the tongue while sweet tastes are detected at the tip — has no scientific basis. That’s the word from Dr. Steven Munger, associate director of the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida.” (Full Huffpost article That Map Of Tastes On The Tongue That You Learned In School Has No Scientific Basis | HuffPost Impact, but even a cursory Google search turns up much more.)

  3. Many generations of highly expert winetasters managed to get by tasting wine from all kinds of glasses and they did just fine. Are we to dismiss the accumulated works of the Titans of Winetasting because they didn’t always use a flat-rim glass until the mid-1990s?

All that said, a large, quality glass makes a huge difference in the flavor of the wine, with “large” being the key factor. A large bowl allows for development of a big aroma by providing a large evaporative surface area when you swirl the wine. When the wine smells better, it tastes better. Good, big glasses enhance the aroma.

When I taste seriously, I inhale the aroma through both my mouth and nose, and after swallowing / spitting, exhale through my mouth and nose, all to keep my smell sense organ saturated with the wine aromas. That’s how a large-bowled wine glass can help a wine taste better, not the rim of the glass. (Caution: this technique can also make a bad wine smell and taste even worse.)

The final conclusion: The rim on the glass is of little importance. The size of the bowl and how you engage your sense of smell is a much more important part of enhancing your wine experience.

Since I sip wine with my tongue placed over the lip of the glass and wag it around as I take a sip, rolled or not rolled makes no difference.

Welcome, by the way!

I will visit your blog!

This is me drinking sauvignon blanc…

Rolled rims are annoying. Also they usually are on glasses that otherwise suck.

I like a rolled rim as it makes me feel safer running my big fingers inside the glass when washing.
:wink:

I think Riedel’s logic on directing aromas and flavors to certain parts of the tongue/palate are fundamentally flawed for some of the reasons mentioned above. If I’m not mistaken, there is independent research out there that shows the shape of the glass is not nearly as important as the size for flavor perception. The argument against the rolled rim causing turbulence doesn’t really hold water to me either since sipping techniques vary. Also, in the mouth, one should agitate, swish, and otherwise create turbulence in the wine is a part of good tasting technique so I can hardly see how rim-generated turbulence would be problematic for the taster.

All that said, I hate rolled rims on wine glasses. I would rather drink from a sharp edged plastic cup than a rolled rim glass (though if that’s all that’s around… any port in a storm). I can’t explain it in any salient way that stands to reason but I really don’t like rolled rim glasses… even for water!

Anton, that series of"dog lapping" pics somehow disturbs me…

Agreed on the dog tongue . . .

You’re welcome!

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What I don’t give a rat’s ass about is arguments about why one should or shouldn’t have a different experience tasting out of a different glass. I’m interested in the direct experience itself.

To the extent it’s important for some folks to ascertain/test validity, isn’t it simple enough to check directly - e.g. drink the same wines from different glasses, blindly, non-blindly, whatever - just be aware there’s pitfalls to any methodology, false positives, false negatives, findings in blind settings which may not carry over perfectly to everyday reality… but at least you’re comparing the taste of apples to the taste of other apples, not trying to argue for which is tastier based on hearing a bit about the varieties’ respective DNA sequences.

Further, “I and others have drunk wine from a wide variety of vessels” + “some study referenced on HuffPo shows taste buds more homogeneously dispersed than previously thought”, to me, seems particularly weak and falls spectacularly short of summing to “the glass don’t make no damn difference (except for maybe bowl volume).” Seems on par with the various experiments and studies one finds online which conclude that nobody really can tell a difference between a $6 wine and a $50 bottle. My two cents anyway.

Welcome to the board. [cheers.gif]

Agreed. Riedel is in the business of selling glassware, so they’ll trot out any old nonsense to get people to buy lots of their products.

I don’t use rolled rim glasses at home but I don’t think I’d turn down a wine served in one, and I really don’t think it would change the experience in any meaningful way.

I think to avoid tactile bias, the test would have to be blind and would consist of pouring the same wine into two equally large wine glasses, one with rolled rim, one without.
Then pouring samples from the glasses into equal small plastic cups for a group of tasters.
Finally, have the tasters try to discern a difference between the two samples.
newhere

Especially if those wines from $6 to $50 were served in an inferior glass!

Stems do matter to me and its just that the nicer ones don’t have a rolled rim. Rolled rims seem to be on the glass ones not crystal not sure why but thats the way it seems to be. Though it only matters as much as you want it to, can I tell the difference between a $600 dollar painting and a $60,000 painting NO because I don’t care about paintings so its not a hobby/passion/lifestyle/business for me thus I have no basis or background to make a the judgement. Now wine and food sign me up to any and all blinds we do it all the time and its part of learning and staying humble.