| Comments | Transcript



All pretension aside, stems on wine glasses do serve a purpose whether TV and movie actors want to believe it or not.
Download the Podcast

Transcript

Mike Supple: I'm Mike Supple and you're watching "Screw It" on SuppleWine TV.

Last night I was watching this week's episode of "Reaper" on The CW, which is a really funny TV show about a guy who has to send escaped souls back to hell, and how he and his buddies go about doing it and all their ridiculous escapades that ensue.

The point though: they spend a lot of time in a bar. Last night there was a guy in the bar drinking wine. He was holding his glass of wine like this [hand cupped around the whole bowl]. Swinging it around, talking to people, just hanging on to that glass for a long time. It reminded me that a lot of people in TV and movies nowadays seem to be holding their glasses this way. So I figured it would be a good time to talk about why wine glasses are made with a stem.

The point of the stem isn't to make you look pompous. The stem is actually a really functional and important part of the wine glass. Wine is very sensitive to temperature. Obviously when you think about white wines, most people know you're supposed to chill a glass of white wine. Cooler temperatures let the fresh, crisp fruit show. Generally you drink red wines at about room temperature. What you don't think about is why you are supposed to drink white wines at cooler temperatures: it has a lot to do with the alcohol in the wine.

When you drink wine, you're drinking it for the flavors and the aromas. As wine warms up, the alcohol starts to have a bigger effect. Particularly once the wine gets to about the mid 70s - the range of about 74 degrees - the alcohol becomes noticeable on the nose and it becomes noticeable in the flavors. You start to taste a little bit of a bitter, kind of tingly sensation. Generally if you're drinking wine, that's not why you're drinking it. If you want to taste alcohol, you'd be drinking a martini. If you're drinking wine, you want to taste the various fruit and oak and butter and whatever else is going on in the particular wine you chose.

So it might follow suit that you don't want to warm up a white wine because you're already drinking it cold, but it's actually even more important for red wine that you hold it by the stem. Red wine is already warmer, which means it's going to warm up to that 74 degree point much faster, and it's going to start releasing those alcohol aromas.

You don't have to hold the stem all delicately and look kind of foolish, look like you're afraid of the wine glass. Stems are pretty big and wine glasses are fairly sturdy. You can go ahead and get a good grasp on that thing. The whole point is that it keeps your hand away from the bowl and keeps the wine from overheating. You look like you know what you're doing. You don't look like you're being pompous and just trying to be outside yourself. You look like you're drinking wine and actually trying to enjoy it.

So go ahead. Grab that wine by the stem there. Swirl it around if you want to, because that releases more aromas. Or don't. Just hang on to it. You can walk around and rest the butt of the glass against your palm to make it nice and stable. It's an easy way to just go out there and really enjoy your wine.

Ignore what TV and movies are telling you and show them you know what you're doing.