Barware, Stemware

Of course, there’s more to stemware than maintaining a façade. For starters there’s the stem, that skinny thing separating the bowl from the foot. It has practical application in that it keeps the hand, a prolific generator of heat, from influencing the temperature of the wine. Makes sense.

But there’s more to stemware than stems, specifically if you buy into all that bouquet and corking tripe dished out by the tight-sphincter-ed sommelier in-crowd. Wines, they tell us, perform best when consumed from the proper glass. Bowl shape better focuses flavor, controls optimum temperature and can even maximize taste by directing the wine to the mouth’s appropriate sensory G-spot. Evidently, God, who really likes it when we drink wine, sectored our tongues with highly specific wine-tasting zones, much the same way he customized the lining of our septums to discern the nuanced flavors of cocaine.

Red wines -- cabernet, Bordeaux, certain Night Train vintages -- prefer wider more voluptuous bowls that let the wine breathe amply and, after contact with the drinker’s hand, quickly find its way back to room temperature. With white wines -- chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Thunderbird varietals – the physics of a narrower and straighter tulip-shaped bowl create less surface area so the wine stays cooler longer.

Champagne, meanwhile, benefits from the even narrower and more elongated champagne flute because the shape maintains coldness and, more importantly, constricts carbonation to keep your bubbly bubbly. As well, the narrower shape also allows more champagne flutes to fit on a serving tray, a bonus during large fetes because the help has to make fewer trips to re-supply.

If you’re a champagne purists, though, you can add to your bar the classic champagne coupe -- that once ubiquitous rounded, broader bowled vessel you can tell your guests was originally created using molds taken from the breasts of Marie Antoinette. Sure, a coupe causes champagne to warm and de-fizz exponentially faster and taste like horse piss, but purists don’t mind. After all, coupes come from molds of Marie Antoinette’s breasts!