Port wine glasses : Getting the best taste out of port wine

Port wine, first grown in the slopes of the Portugal city Oporto, has its admirers across the world. Like the drink itself, port wine glasses have also evolved as a fashion statement over the years. The collection of port wine glasses in the bar of the connoisseur reveals his / her taste - or the lack of it - for the best in wine that the world has to offer.

While warring with the French, the English were starved off their favorite french wine. To make up for this shortage, they started searching for alternative places where vineyards could be cultivated, and stumbled upon the steep slopes of the Duoro valley near the Oporto city. The rest, as they say, is history.

The real "taste" of wine is in its "smell". The tongue has the ability to distinguish between sweet and bitter, and between the salty and the sour. Its actually the nose that brings to you the other aromas of butter, nuts, grass, etc. Special port wine glasses have been created just to enable the nose to discern between the individual aromas that a given wine brings with it.

There is always a difference between gulping the wine from a plain water glass and a specially crafted port wine glass. The white wine will truly bring its multi-year blended sweetness or dryness only in such glassware created especially for this purpose. A tawny wine will reveal its
mellowed flavour of ten years in the oak barrel only when held in these masterpieces - and not otherwise.

The thickness of the glass, the wideness of the inner bowl, and the narrowness of the opening at the top - all these, and of course, the meticulous care that has gone in its manufacture - arethe hallmarks of a port wine glass. These fine points add up to determine how the aroma of the wine
that the glass holds reaches your nose. It was the Austria-based Riedel company that began the journey of discovery towards the shapes and sizes of glasses that can enhance the tastes of different wines. Their glasses, and that of the others that followed, focus on the tongue's taste zones that come in contact with the wine first. Even before the liquid touches the tongue, the aroma that accumulates in
the tiny air pocket, above the liquid surface and below the rim, hits the nostrils first. This also implies that the glass should always be just half-full or thereabouts - for the air pocket to become heady!

The Riedel glass series - right from the reasonably priced Overture, through to the Vinum and finally the top-of-the-charts Sommeliers have been traditionally the most sought after. Not exactly for the hoi-polloi, these glasses, especially the Sommeliers, are exquisitely hand-made, and bring live the real spirit of the wine to its drinker.

Crystal glasses are an universal favorite - colored glasses, though in vogue for some time, have lost their appeal.
Port wine glasses without any etchings or carvings on them also command a premium, as there is no chance of any
prismatic color play possible on the wine inside.

Port wine glasses are best cleaned by washing with hands. After a hot water rinse, it is advisable to polish the port
wine glass quickly with clean linen. Also, its best not to use the dishwasher to clean these expensive, exquisitely
crafted glasses, for you may get a broken stem at the end of the cleaning exercise!

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