5/31/2023 0 Comments Licecap on wineI suppose this could be a useful thing to think about and look out for if you’re tasting many wines by the glass, but to be honest, if I’m curious about the alcohol content of my wine, I tend to just look at the figure printed on the label of the bottle. Wine legs do tell us something: the alcohol content of wine. In all my years working as a wine journalist and taster, I’ve never met anybody who could read wine legs with any accuracy, and have only ever really heard them referred to in really poor jokes about the wine having better legs than the waitresses. Put simply, it doesn’t tell us anything of the sort. There is an enduring myth out there which claims that the amount of droplets present on your glass relates to the overall quality of the wine (more legs equals better wine, apparently). Also known rather romantically as “the tears of wine” in French, these are the streaks of wine and droplets which gather to the sides of your glass when you swirl your wine around. This brings us to the subject of wine legs. ![]() What you can almost never do, however, is judge the quality or flavors of a wine by merely looking at it in the glass. You can also have a good guess at the grape varietal used in the wine - vivid reds for Sangiovese, ruby for Pinot Noir, etc, etc. Oxidised and corked wines tend to look muddy and opaque, white wines which have turned bad go a sort of amber color. For example, you can probably identify (without too much difficulty) whether a wine has spoiled by looking at the color. With training, and a careful eye, you can come to many conclusions about a wine by looking at in in the glass. There are plenty of myths connected to the appearance of wine in the bottle - for example, the depth of the dimple in the base of a bottle has nothing to do with the quality of the content inside the bottle - and a seemingly equal number of mistruths connected to how wine appears in the glass, too. I don’t know the reasons, but it is a source of annoyance for me. Again, why this drink is surrounded by quite so much mythology is something of a mystery to me maybe it’s got something to do with the amount of time wine has been around for (up to 10,000 years if some historians are to be believed), perhaps it has something to do with the religious connotations of wine, or the elitism which has sprung up around wine over the past century. ![]() In these blogs, I’ve found myself discussing at length some of the myths and mistruths which are bandied about throughout the wine world. When outside, on a picnic or sitting at a street cafe, I love to watch the sunlight catch the ruby-reds of a good glass of Cabernet, or sitting in a restaurant or at home, I always take a moment to see how the candlelight plays with the wine through the glass. ![]() The colors the myriad shades which range from the palest green to the deepest, darkest, inkiest purple are a real joy to behold, and they do give you some indication of what it is you’re about to taste. For me personally, one of my favorite things about wine is the way it looks. Looking at your wine in the glass should always be the first thing you do, before you inhale the aromas or take a sip. In some ways, this is all part of the fun of wine drinking - observing it, considering the liquid, eyeballing it in the glass as you gently swirl it around…and it also enhances your enjoyment of the wine when it does finally hit your palate. There are countless ways you can get some idea of the character of a wine, before you’ve actually tasted it.
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