Zalto glasses: just beautiful

One thing that true wine nuts get excited about, apart from wine, is the topic of wine glasses.

Riedel are the best known wine glass manufacturer - they make a large range, with specific shapes favouring particular styles of wine. They also make different levels of quality, ranging up to the hand blown Sommeliers, which cost a fortune.

I've recently come across another glass manufacturer whose glasses I really love: Zalto (their website is here). These are truly beautiful hand blown glasses that are amazingly light and delicate, yet quite flexible and resilient, too. I have three of them: the universal white, the universal red and the Burgundy glass. They're expensive at around £25 each, but for such quality, they're excellent value, especially compared with the cost of the Riedel Sommeliers.

Available in the UK from Around Wine

Cleaning glasses

Clean glasses are really important for enjoying wine. It's not rare to encounter smelly glasses that make it hard to appreciate the aroma of a wine. This is especially common where you are faced with a flight of several glasses: the more glasses are used in a tasting, the harder it is to ensure that they are really clean.

I'm quite obsessional about washing glasses. This is how I do it:

1. I use a cloth and lots of hot soapy water. I know some people don't like using detergent because of worries about residues, but unless you use soap it's hard to get the glass really clean, especially if it is a bit greasy.

2. Then I wash the glass out with lots of hot water. Lots and lots. Soapy glasses kill wine.

3. I don't use mineral water to do a final rinse with, so I have to make sure that the glasses are dried properly. I use a microfibre glass cleaning cloth (here), which does the job really well.

I wouldn't use a dishwasher for wine glasses. I'd also avoid turning them upside down on a cloth to dry them: this can make the rim a bit smelly. It's really worth the effort of washing glasses well before you put them away, because then you can use them without worrying about whether they are going to be smelly or not. If you are in doubt about a glass, a quick rinse with wine primes the glass nicely.