This seems like one of those there is no topic too small for wine people to obsess over issues.
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I once was sitting with a local (rather known) winemaker and he strongly advised against water to rinse, I don‘t recall his reasoning but stopped doing so since, YMMV
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A few mL of residual water is a significant percentage of a small tasting pour. It will alter the structure. For a full glass pour, I doubt the impact would be noticeable.
I arranged a tasting on Long Island for Sparky Marquis about 15 year ago. He poured 8-10 wines. I meet him 90 minutes before the tasting ( was done at a steakhouse using restaurants stems and Sparkys wine that be shipped for the tasting) Every single glass was single use ( everyone had all the wines in front of them when tasting started so no reusing of stems).
Sparky primed every clean glass with the wine being tasted in that glass.
He also did the mollydooker shake ( opened bottle poured out an ounce or two put screw cap back on and did a shake for a few seconds, then pour out wines for tasting ( he said it dispersed the inert glass in younger vintages and was not needed on wines older than 5-7 years)
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I find that being too anal retentive about anything diminishes the pleasure for myself AND those around me.
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A few not-well-grounded-scientifically thoughts:
- It seems surprisingly hard to get all the water out of a glass by shaking. Only a towel seems to really work.
- I suspect it depends in part on the composition of the glass, as different glasses have very different surfaces if you look at them under a microscope. You’ll notice, too, that, when washed, some glasses have lots of water drops while others shed those easily. (I find my old high-lead Riedel Burgundy balloons are very hard to wipe fully and retain water spots much more than other stems.)
- Dilution seems like a minimal risk, but if you pour wine into a glass with even a small amount of residual water, it does seem to alter the surface tension. I would imagine that might affect aromas – releasing or withholding them, I’m not sure which. Perhaps this is related to the fact that the aromas of whisky are released when it’s served over ice. The slow dilution has a very noticeable impact.
- I’m not sure if water – even distilled/purified – does as good a job of neutralizing/diluting aromas from the previous wine. Does the alcohol perhaps dissolve some trace aromas better for a rinse? If I have to reuse a glass that held a wine with TCA, I’d certainly prefer to rinse with wine.
That said, I have used water many times at in-store tastings. But nothing is ideal about those.
Footnote: When I visited the Marchesi di Gresy in Barbaresco many years ago, the woman who greeted me opened a new bottle and poured what must have been six or eight ounces into a very large Riedel bowl (~30 ounces), then swirled and dumped it. Only then did she pour me my taste. No one beats the Italians when it comes to stemware and wine service!
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You know when people actually make wine that they do everything they can to keep water out of it…
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I’ve developed a three pour rinse system between wines when I have limited glassware.
I use a graduated cylinder to measure about 50 ml (about 1.5 ounces) of distilled water per rinse. I’ve found this is sufficient for rinsing. Doesn’t have to be exactly 50, but any more is wasteful.
The first rinse is what I think of as a rough swirl, to remove all the obvious liquid in the glass.
The second rinse is the detailed swirl. I check for any discoloration to make sure I’ve removed any of the wine that was in the glass. If discoloration remains, I may repeat this step.
Third rinse is swirled 8-10 times, and then I drink the water. This serves the dual purpose of allowing me to test for any lingering vinous flavors in the water, as well as an opportunity to rinse my mouth and swallow some water to stay hydrated.
Works perfectly.
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Might be true for you and me, but the pick-at-26+brix camp might not see things the same way 
…
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You mean not everyone adds chlorinated water?!?
Fucking heretics.
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An amusing thread. When switching from white to red, or the reverse, sometimes I’ll do a little rinse. Sometimes with water, sometimes with the next wine, more often than not, no rinse at all. Unless it’s an unusual transition, like to/from a sweet wine to dry, then I’ll probably do a water rinse. Shake out the glass (turning upside down into my napkin, or a paper placemat is pretty functional). A few drops of residual water doesn’t bother me in the least, wine is already 85% water, another drop or two won’t make a bit of difference. Mostly, I just dump whatever’s left in my glass and move on to the next wine without thinking much about it.
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At each UGC tasting I’ve been to, the winemakers have been aghast at using water in between wines. It wasn’t about dilution, but water’s pH.
Yeah, that neutral water can wreak havoc on a wine 
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When I’ve demonstrated my system to Alan, he got all ‘professional chemist’ on me. He explained how I was failing to take into account air pressure, dew point, and local gravity variations and therefore not reading the meniscus correctly. I was surprised that he claimed that a drop of his urine in the rinse water would remove biochemical deposits in a ‘self-correcting personal biomolecular self-referentially regulating manner.’ And people call me weird.
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That’s my reluctance to use water. Not that I’m worried about dilution or chlorine, but it just clings all over the glass and looks crappy.
If I’m going from one red to a next white, or one white to a next white, I usually just pour it right in and don’t worry about having rinsed. If I’m going from red to white, then I’ll pour a little white in, swirl, and dump or swallow it.
If the prior wine was corked or otherwise badly flawed, I’ll probably switch glasses, or if I can’t, I’d wash and dry the whole thing before moving on.
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No way I’d just rinse a TCA contaminated glass with the next wine. New glass time, but I mostly drink at home and have backup glasses for backup glasses. Nonetheless, no way I’m shaking a glass to get rid of water. Glasses are too expensive. I don’t shake my eyeglasses after washing already broke some hinges.
If the water is neutral and the wine isnt, the water will pull the ph of the wine towards a more neutral ph (boooo)
Yeah, it will. Just to bring some reality to the discussion, say you have a few drops of water left in your glass. Let’s say 3 drops. A drop of water is about 0.05ml, so you have 0.15ml of water. If your pour is 1 oz, that’s 30ml. So the added water is a dilution of 0.5%. Less if the pour is bigger. Folks are free to worry about that, I just don’t.
As for pH, if your wine has a pH of 3.5, and you dilute it by 0.5%, the new pH will be 3.502
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My concern is that theres usually more in there. Sometimes you get that little pool in the bottom of your glass, sometimes theres a significant amount on the sides that gets picked up with a swirl.
Id eather leave a little of the last wine in there, but thats probably because I dont have that great of a nose to start with… 