![]() ![]() It's also worth noting that all wine glasses prior this were straight sided, the "egg" shaped design of modern wine glasses was another Claus Riedel innovation. Thus, the grape specific shapes that we use today were born. Even though they were drinking the same wine, his friend's opinions on it's quality were hugely diverse, leading him to suspect that the shape and size of the glass was influencing the taste. Maximilian Riedel tells a story of how his grandfather, Claus Riedel an apprentice glassmaker in Italy in the 1950's, would invite friends round and they would drink wine from all the different, experimental shapes that he had been working on. So different glasses can make the same wine taste different. ![]() The truth is that the shape of the glass will affect how much wine gets into our mouth, whether it travels across the tongue to the back or spreads to the sides. But is the big claret balloon actually helpful? The shape of the glass affects how we taste wine We’ve all seen people sticking their whole nose inside a fishbowl-sized glass, which holds just a tiny puddle of red wine at the bottom. He added lead oxide and flint to the mix, which made the glass stronger still, and gave it the look of crystal.This is because lead oxide affects how the light passes through – it causes the different colours in light to travel at different speeds, a process known as dispersion. In the 1670's George Ravenscroft was put in charge of trying to make glass better and more beautiful. Fermenting wine was shattering French bottles all over the shop, but the English starting re-bottling their imported French wine and fizzy wine could begin to be celebrated.) (This stronger glass also produced stronger bottles, which played a crucial role in the birth of champagne. ![]() This burned to much higher temperatures, creating hotter furnaces, which immediately strengthened the glass. So English glassmakers turned to sea-coal. They were depleting the forests of trees needed for ship building. In the 17th Century, the English began to follow in the footsteps of the Venetians and create a glass industry of their own.Ī crucial moment in the development of glass came when the Royal Navy asked glassmakers to stop cutting down oak trees to fuel their fires. The symptoms of "glass disease" were initially “weeping”, when moisture caused alkali to be leached out of the glass, and “crizzling”, a series of very fine cracks caused by the loss of alkali that eventually caused the glass to fall apart. This meant that the original clear glasses could start to deteriorate quite quickly in normal air. ![]() However, when the Venetian glassmakers began to purify their raw materials to remove elements that caused discolouration, they inadvertently removed some of the things that were making the glass durable, like lime, which acted as a stabiliser. The Venetians had learnt how to purify their alkaline source which meant that they could make “cristallo” – a very sought-after form of clear glass. The glass as we know it probably emerged around 1400 in Venice.īack then, Venice was the centre of the glassblowing world. People have been using glass to drink wine from since ancient times, but the modern-day design we think of – essentially a bowl, a stem and a base – is medieval. ![]()
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