[中英字幕] 葡萄酒杯盲品測試（一）黑皮諾杯｜Wine Glasses, the Ultimate Test, by Konstantin Baum MW

Hi, my name is Konstantin Baum. I'm a master of wine and this topic was requested by you guys and I wanted to do it anyways. We're going to talk about the most important tool when it comes to wine tasting, wine glasses. And I'm going to do a blind tasting of a bunch of different glasses to find out which glass is the best. So, let's go. First of all, hello to all of the new faces. It's great that so many of you have found their way to my channel recently. If you haven't subscribed yet, then please do subscribe. It's free and it's your chance to learn more about wine. The world of wine is filled with glass, but that hasn't always been the case. The first evidence of wine production is roughly 9000 years old, but wine glasses only became popular a few hundred years ago. Glass is made from silica, the main constituent of sand. Remember the fact that wine glasses and wine bottles are made from the main ingredient in many minerals. When someone talks about the minerality of a wine, but that's a different story. Before the introduction of industrial glass making, wine was consumed from all different kinds of cups. Or this cow horn for example. The English businessman George Ravenscroft was the first to produce clear crystal glassware on an industrial scale. The glasses that were produced back then were made from lead crystal. Due to health concerns, lead crystal is rarely used today and the lead is replaced by barium, zinc or potassium. Wine glasses are the essential drinking vessel in the world of wine today. They have many advantages as they don't influence the smell or the taste of the wine as long as they are properly cleaned. They also allow you to observe the color of the wine through the glass. The stem of the glass protects the wine from smudgy fingers and from heating up in the hand. It is also easier to swirl a wine glass with the stem. The big disadvantage of glass is that it breaks fairly easily into sharp pieces, but I think that's pretty much it. When it comes to glass quality, there are many different levels, but the main difference is really between handmade glasses and machine made glasses. Glass making is a craft and it's very impressive if you look at someone making a wine glass out of a chunk of glowing hot glass using some very simple tools. The general process is however pretty similar and in my experience there's no major difference between the taste and the smell of a handmade and a machine made glass. But handmade glasses are much more expensive than machine made ones. For my Master of Wine exam I used machine made glasses and I don't think that it negatively impacted my tasting ability. Otherwise I would have definitely gotten handmade ones. Why glasses have the shapes they have is partly due to practical reasons, for example how many of them fit on a tray. And also due to optical reasons, how beautiful they look. Glasses have become bigger and bigger over the years and today some of them really look like fish bowls. The big trend from the 20th century onwards was to produce grape variety and wine style specific glasses. This was spearheaded by Riedel and most of the other big producers followed. Another trend has emerged over the last few decades for a universal glass as more and more wine consumers and wine professionals realized they had way too many glasses in their cupboards. I have a lot of different glasses and I use them all but there are four different glass shapes that I use way more often than the other ones. First of all the sparkling wine glass which has changed quite a lot over the last few years. But I like the big tulip shaped sparkling wine glasses as I get just much more aroma out of the wine with those glasses. Then there's the white wine glass which is a Riesling glass but I use it pretty universally for most white wines. Then we have the Bordeaux glass which is used for Bordeaux varieties but I really use it for pretty much all red wines. Apart from Spätburgunder or Pinot Noir which I use my Pinot Noir glass for, I also use it for Nebbiolo and sometimes I use it for oaky intense and concentrated white wines. There are very few scientific studies that look at the impact of a glass on the smell and the taste of a wine. And I think most of the general concepts are based on few facts and a lot of imagination. But today I want to find out the truth so I'm going to do the ultimate test for all of these Pinot Noir glasses including a plastic cup. I'm going to tell you which glass I prefer in terms of quality, design and price. And then I'm going to do a blind tasting of one bottle of Pinot Noir from all of these different glasses in order to find the perfect match. I put all of those glasses in order of price from 1 cent for the plastic cup to roughly 50 US dollars for the Zia Intense. The lightest glass out of all of them is the Sophienwald Phoenix at 103 grams for the glass. And the heaviest glasses are the WMF and the Riedel Wings at 189 grams. For the tasting I prepared a wine that I know pretty well, the 2016 Les Bourgognons from Domaine de la Monette in Mercure. I'm going to put on gloves so that I don't feel the glass and I'm going to cover my eyes so that I don't see the glass. So that's a real blind tasting for you. You might be surprised to hear that my favorite glass isn't the plastic cup. It's actually the Riedel Performance Glass. I'm not being paid to say this but I just like the way this glass looks and feels. It has those cool waves inside of the glass that are supposed to bring out even more of the aroma. And it's actually still fairly affordable. All of those high-end glasses are very expensive but this retails around 23 euros or 25 US dollars roughly. And if you break a glass, it's kind of good that you're not going to break your bank in order to replace it. But now I'm going to see which glass actually performs best in the blind tasting. And for that, I will ask my wife to pass out the glasses in a random order so that I don't know which one is which. And then I will find the winner. OK, let's go. The wine smells of cherries and slightly spicy. But I don't really like the way it approaches my palate. So it's a bit harsh on the palate. So I would say this is not great. Next. I get a lot of cherry flavor, spicy notes. There's a lot of black tea. This is good. Next. So again, lots of cherries, lots of spices. Maybe the cherry flavors come out even more on this wine. Yeah, I like it. So flavor-wise, you get a lot of fruit flavor here but not so many spice notes. So there's a little bit less complexity, I would say. So it's not a hard pass but I like this less. OK, next. There's good reason why wine glasses get smaller on the top because I don't really smell a lot. On the palate, it's actually all right. But I can smell nothing but my leather gloves. So this is a hard no. So I'm getting a lot of chocolate and spice flavors but not really fruit flavors. So there's an important part missing. No. So this is really weird because the wine feels a little bit hollow. You don't really smell much. It's almost like smelling it from the plastic cup early on. No, this is not one of my favorites. Next. OK, that's it. Let's see which ones I liked best. All right. That's kind of interesting. So I discarded a lot of different glasses. And I liked two glasses best that are a bit surprising. I mean, this is actually not a big surprise because I know what this glass can do. And it has proven itself even in the blind tasting. And this is actually the cheapest proper glass at least. I mean, it's cheaper than all of the other glasses apart from this plastic cup. I think it was 9 euros retail. It's the WMF Burgundy Glass. And it performed pretty well. But I got to say, I'm not surprised about this one. It's a bit sad about those because they were actually all of the most expensive ones. And it shows again that price doesn't always matter. It's about what happens in the glass. So this was quite eye-opening, I'd say. So thank you for watching. If you like this video, then please like it down here. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already. My question of the day is which one is your favorite wine glass? Just comment down below. I hope I see you guys again soon. Until then, stay thirsty.