Why should we drink wine in stemmed glasses?

As winelovers you may be used to drinking your wine in a stemmed glass. But do you know why ? Here are some stories about this old tradition.

Stemmed glasses to avoid poisonings

For some people, wine should be drunk in a tasting stemmed glass. Even if it’s true today, this was not always the case. Stemmed glasses appeared following the Affair of the Poisons, a series of scandals related to poisoning attempts between 1679 and 1682. Senior officials of the Court of Louis XIV and Parisians aristocrats were involved in it. After this case, it was common to serve wine in stemmed glasses, holding them by the stem. This way, it was impossible to put poison in it. Indeed, the hand was not in contact with the rim of the glass.

Wine serving in stemmed glasses : The golden rule for professional wine-tastings

Those days are long gone. Nowadays, drinking wine in a ordinary glass of water seems unthinkable. The reason is purely gastronomic.

When you drink in a ordinary glass without stem, you have to hold it at full hand grip which reheat it and change the taste of the wine. However, a stemmed glass let us pull away our hand from the bowl and thus maintain at right temperature. Moreover, using the stem allows us to swirl the wine in order to reveal its aromas.