Wine glasses can be confusing. Beyond the basics — with stems or without, white wine and red wine — there are glasses for specific varietals. That’s why we broke down what wine glasses work best with certain types of wine in our blog Which Wine Glass Fits Your Red and White Wine Needs? Once you have the proper wine glass for your wine the next step to achieving the optimum wine pour is opening the wine to ensure you don’t break or shred your cork.
Just like wine glasses, there are several wine openers to choose from. Regardless of which opener you prefer it’s important to cut the foil on the cork. This method tends to reduce stray drips when pouring at the table, and from your cork breaking while trying to open your wine.
That brings us to the next important step. Opening your bottle of wine the right way for the optimum pour. First, you want to poke the cork slightly off-center and you want the radial diameter of the worm (the ‘worm’ is the curlycue part of a wine opener) to be centered so that it’s less likely to tear the cork. It also ensures the cork won’t shred and fall into your bottle of wine.
Now, for the most important step… pouring a standard wine pour. At We The People, our standard wine pour doesn’t always meet the standards we are about to set for you (we like a slightly larger pour, but do as we say, not as we do! While the serving size might look sparse, rest assured it’s not. Most wine glasses hold eight to 12 ounces — and many bowl-shaped glasses are large enough to hold an entire bottle of wine! The widest point of a glass is your sweet spot that tends to coincide with the five- to six-ounce mark which by regulation is a “standard serving size.”
Pouring to this mark does more than measure. By pouring to the widest point of your glass it gives ample room for swirling the wine in your glass while avoiding the spills that come with swirling a full glass. It also gives the wine plenty of room to breathe because the space in the glass is designed to hold aromas, so try your best not to overfill.
We hope this helps you pour optimal glasses of wine for friends and family this holiday season! If you have any questions or tricks to pouring a perfect glass, please share them with us at support@wethepeople.wine.
