Tag Archives: Champagne glasses

Winebits 704: Champagne glasses, consolidation, wine trends

champagne glasses
“How quaint.. Champagne flutes.”

This week’s wine news: Once again, Champagne flutes are passe, plus Big Wine gets bigger and the worst wine trends

• Bring on the glass – or not: The Wine Curmudgeon has watched the long history of the correct Champagne glass with much amusement. There have been at least three “proper” glasses for sparkling wine in the past 30 years, and that doesn’t include this one. The flute, the staple of the past 20 years or so, has fallen out of favor because it wasn’t up to the “nuanced vineyard expression, à la Burgundy,” of post-modern Champagne, reports PunchDrink.com. Who knew? Or even what that means? I can’t shake the feeling, though, that the change in glass type has as much to do with getting wine drinkers to buy more expensive glasses – call it premiumization for crockery – as anything else.

• Big Wine gets bigger: Delicato, the fifth-biggest winery in the country, has bought Coppola, the No. 17 producer. After the sale, Delicato will account for almost 18 million cases of wine a year, or about 7 ½ percent of the California wine sold in the U.S. annually, according to Wine Business Monthly. No price was disclosed, reports the Wine Spectator, and Coppola’s high-end Inglenook in Napa and Domaine de Broglie in Oregon were not included. Instead, Delicato – perhaps best known for its Bota Box wines – will get Coppola’s supermarket brands, including Diamond Collection, Director’s Cut, and Sofia.

• Say the experts: The Vinepair website asked “wine pros” to pick the worst trends in wine. Not surprisingly, two involved natural wine – wine’s most controversial topic – and one defended natural wine while one criticized it. Best yet, natural wine is almost unknown to people who aren’t wine professionals and irrelevant to almost everyone else who drinks wine. And people wonder why I worry about the future of the wine business. The other worst trends included healthy and diet wine, new-style red blends, and complicated corkscrews.

Photo:“Two champagne glasses” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Enough with the Champagne glass conspiracy already – can’t we just drink and enjoy?

Champgne glass
$60 will buy two Reidel Veritas Champagne glasses — and won’t we sleep better at night after that purchase?

Once again, we’re being told that we aren’t drinking bubbly from the correct glasses, and we’d better stop – or else

A couple of months ago, when I wrote about the most recent Champagne glass conspiracy, I thought we were done with worrying about what a Champagne glass should look like. The glass in that post was so over the top that only the geekiest among us would pay attention. And the rest of us could enjoy our bubbly in whatever glasses we had, content that the wine business has passed us by.

Silly me.

Once again, we’re being told that we aren’t drinking bubbly from the correct glasses, and that we must spend $30 a glass to do it the proper way. It’s called the Veritas glass from our friends at Reidel – with a wider middle and narrow top, two design changes that are supposed to help us enjoy more aromas and flavors. No, this isn’t as bizarre as the cement mixer glass from the previous post (which also needs to be dusty to work most efficiently), but it’s overkill nonetheless.

Most of us spend less than $15 a bottle for sparkling wine. Why do we need to pay twice as much for the glass? Why can’t we enjoy our bubbly in whatever glasses we have and be done with it?

Because this is wine, and if they aren’t telling us what to do, they’re reminding us that what we do is wrong. And, by the way, spend more money.

I wrote this in the previous Champagne glass post, and it’s worth repeating: “What difference does the design make to the vast majority of wine drinkers? Can we tell the difference between the bubbles in a flute glass and in the cement mixer glass? Isn’t the wine just as enjoyable in the former? The answers: Almost certainly not, and of course. And I can’t imagine most of us want to drink wine out of a dusty glass.”

But then again, what do we know? We’re just the slobs who pay for everything.