All About Wine And Its Goodness!

The amount of wine made every year is simply staggering. It has been enjoyed all over the world for thousands of years and the cup of choice is almost always the glass. Have you ever asked yourself though, why from a glass? Why not from a wooden goblet, mug or plastic cup? The answer may not exactly be what you expected. You will find in fact a number of different alternative materials used in various countries that wine is drunk from. For example in Japan, wine is drunk from a ceramic vase-shaped container and in Thailand, wooden cups are often used. However, the overriding choice of tableware drinking vessel, wherever you go, is glass. As it happens this is not down to glass being particularly excellent, rather the alternatives being really just not that suitable. Let take a look at them shall we.

Wood. As mentioned previously, wine is drunk from wooden cups in some places but it does have some major flaws. First off, the wood often gets stained in you choose to drink red wine from it. Even if the wood is of a very high quality, staining will happen. Further to this, wood has a habit of rotting when its remains wet for any great length of time. So after each use, time would have to be spent drying it out and removing any moisture.

Metal. If you have ever drunk wine from a metal cup you will know it’s not the best experience ever. something called ‘displacement’ takes place with lots of wines as a result of the high ion count in most metals. This means that when the wine comes into contact with the metal it absorbs a number of the ions and effects the flavour. This is why you often pick up metallic notes when drink from this type of cup. Also, because of its very heat-conductive qualities, almost any other material would keep the wine cooler when you’re holding it

Ceramic.  Like glass, ceramic is non porous, does not release any of its qualities into the wine, and can be easily cleaned with a glass cloth. This is why lots of people do use ceramic, although there will never be as many people as use glass because, very simply, you cannot see what is in the vessel. A large part of the experience of enjoying a fine wine is watching it swirl around the glass, admiring its body. Since glass was first developed, we have had the very simple and instinctive desire for this.

Tags: drink, glass, goblet, taste, wine, wines

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under food and wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.