THE SCIENCE OF WINE GLASSES
DOES IT really matter which glass you use when enjoying your favorite wine? Actually, it does and a team of scientists has gone to great lengths to prove it. New research demonstrates that the shape of a wine glass does affect how wine taste and smells. To elaborate their theory, researchers developed a camera system to observe how the chemical profile of wine is altered as it exits different shapes. The system featured a mesh strainer coated with alcohol oxidase, an enzyme that converts alcohols and oxygen into aldehydes and hydrogen peroxide. The mesh also featured horseradish peroxide and luminol so that the presence of hydrogen peroxide would initiate a color change. The mesh was placed atop variously sized wine glasses as they were tipped to release the contents over the edge. A camera interpreted the chemical reactions and changing colors to map the concentration and distribution of ethanol as left each glass. Researchers used their system to test a variety wines in three different glass shapes. They also tested each combination at a variety of temperature points. Different combinations produced different concentrations and distributions of ethanol – which can affect a taster’s ability to identify the subtleties of food flavors in a wine. “We selected three types of glasses – a wine glass, a cocktail glass, and a straight glass – to determine the differences in ethanol emission caused by the shape effects of the glass,” researchers explained in their paper on the experiment, published in the journal ANALYST.
Traditional wine glasses produced a distribution of wine concentrated around the rim of the glass, with less ethanol in the center. “This ring phenomenon allows us to enjoy the wine aroma without interference of gaseous ethanol,” study author Kohji Mitsubayashi, a researcher at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, said. “Accordingly, wine glass shape has a very sophisticated functional design for tasting and enjoying wine.”
“Bearing in mind the flavor enhancer properties of ethanol, this work provides an unprecedented image of the claimed impact of glass geometry on the overall complex wine flavor perception,” said Regis Gougeon, a wine scientist at the University of Burgundy, in France.
