Wednesday Wine 101

Q.

What’s the proper level wine should be poured?

A.

While members of your book club may offer generous high fives for your ability to pour until the wine trembles at the very top of the glass, yet not tumble over the edge (and to be fair we would high five your efforts as well), those kind of vinous hijinx don’t really impress at the local yacht club.

For proper service, pour to where the bowl just begins to widen. This will probably be about a third of the glass, unless you have one of those behemoth glasses that also double as soup terrines.

This size of pour will allow you to swirl your wine with ample room and also allow for a generous amount of air to fill the glass and aerate the wine.

And on a serious note, it’s actually a bit of a pet peeve of ours when servers fill up our glasses to the halfway (or higher) mark, as we have a tendency to under pour our wines. Especially with whites, we prefer our wine to stay in the bottle or decanter chilling, than filled in our glass getting warm. It’s not like the wine bottle is about to run away, so we’re content to pour a civilized amount and refill as needed – which maybe every two minutes, but still.