Wine and Plastic Cups: Not a Perfect Pairing
Editor's note: On Fridays Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 joins us to talk some Serious Grape. Today, some advice for entertaining this weekend. Take it away, Deb!
"If you can't be bothered washing stemware or are worried about fragile stems breaking outside, get yourself some stemless wine glasses."
This weekend, at cookouts all over America, people will be drinking wine out of plastic cups.
Sometimes, you just have to. Between the breakage issues and the cleanup issues, we can all be forgiven for occasionally serving Chardonnay in plastic tumblers.
But the wine will suffer for it. It will have barely any taste, no discernible aromas, and seem tart and slightly vinegary. At a backyard cookout that may matter less than someone stepping on broken glass or facing a sink full of dishes. But before you pour your cult Cabernet into a plastic cup, here's what I found out about the importance of good stemware at a seminar led by Georg Riedel, the founder of the wineglass company Riedel.
I knew in a vague way that serving wine in proper glasses mattered. But I had no idea how much until Georg Riedel led more than a hundred of us through a tasting this spring at the Hospice du Rhône event in Paso Robles. We tasted some pretty superb wine in everything from plastic cups to handblown lead crystal. The results were convincing: what you put your wine into matters as much as the wine itself.