We were having a discussion about an upcoming dinner, and the topic of ISO glasses came up.
I’ve tasted out of ISO glasses when doing large tastings, etc, and I have many of them myself. But for me, I find the glass entirely too small to get a good feel for the wine. Yet these are the standard that are used in many professional tastings. When I did a little research on them, I learned how they were scientifically proven to be the best glass for a tasting.
But digging deeper, a few things jumped out at me.
First, the standard, ISO 3591:1977, was defined in 1977. Certainly we have come a long way in the world of wine since then. And although it gets reviewed every now and then, it has never changed.
Second, many of the “studies” focused on the shape of the glass, not the size of the glass. Yes, the tulip shape is ideal. But in such a small glass, how much do you really lose? And can the tulip shape be improved?
Given that we are coming up on the 40 year anniversary, wouldn’t it be great to see some of the experts and MW’s come together and push for an updated standard that reflects today’s advance in wine?
When I take a sip, I also breathe in through my nose. The ISO glass is so small that my nose is out of the glass, and I feel I miss a big part of the wine.
ISO glasses don’t do it for me. They may be some expert panel’s definition of “best,” but it’s pretty hard to come up with a single set of objective criteria that apply equally to different styles of wine. I wouldn’t want to waste a great bottle by having to drink it out of an ISO glass.
There is a chain store here that I call the King of the 6-15€ wines. They have almost everything lined up along the walls, and you can taste everything. (They also have premium wines that they open on some evening tastings) They used to have ISO, but have changed to an all-purpose sort of white wine glass. A vast improvement.
The advantage of the ISO glass is that you can fit a lot of them on a table or in a box.
The disadvantage is that you can’t taste wine in them.
I don’t know if they’re still used commonly in French wineries, as they were. I know the Italians had moved on by the late 90s and were serving serious reds out of serious Riedel stems.
They’re good for dessert wines / fortifieds where you may not want too much wine in your glass. Otherwise, yes the world has moved on and we probably need a new ISO
I think the small size - especially the diameter - may be favoured to slow down oxygenation of the wines prior to being tasted. In high profile wine competition judging, with upwards of 50 wines being tasted in a session, the wines often have to sit and wait a while for the judges to arrive. So the issue may not be what the judge can detect, but what the wine can offer after sitting for up to an hour in the glass. I know WSET will disagree with that, but they are not running mass wine evaluations with commercially-significant outcomes for dozens of wine producers.
Our amateur wine group abandoned traditional ISO glassware some 10 years ago [after many years dutifully seeking the “objective truth” about a wine], preferring a larger version with the same overall shape to get greater resonance from the wine. For my own burgundy, brunello and barolo events, I prefer to use the appropriate dinner wine glassware, to allow the bouquets of the wines to be appreciated as fully as possible - I also believe the shape of the lip of the glass contributes to the tasting pleasure. I book venues that I know have enough of that kind of glassware. We pour just before tasting, after post-slow oxygenation or decanting as felt necessary. IMO, if your ‘judging’ of wines in a tasting does not have commercial consequences, it makes more sense to judge wines as you would encounter them in a dining situation. We always follow with dinner, so participants can match the themed wine with a specially chosen menu (when more wines of the same theme are served). I wish there were more competitive tastings that judged wines in relation to their affinity to certain food types and combinations.
But that’s for another thread
The problem is that WSET and all kinds of other official tastings use this terrible glass.
Not sure how to even challenge it…
Then why bother?
And why would “experts and MWs” have any idea how a glass should be designed? I taste with a lot of MWs - some are good tasters, some aren’t. Collectively why would they have any more idea about how to design a glass than would a group of people on a wine forum? Everyone might have an opinion, but then everyone has an opinion about the wine they’re drinking. And given that the collective would include people of many different shapes, sizes, discernment, and interests, the consensus design may be just as useless as the current one.
I don’t put my nose in the glass and inhale when I take a sip, but I do like to smell whatever it is I’m eating or drinking, and those little glasses never did it for me. So I just don’t use them. Who cares what the WSET people use, or anyone else for that matter?
I agree that they are not the ‘best thing since sliced bread’ but they have their uses. Having been around them for years, I guess that I am well calibrated to them and they at least provide a reliable benchmark if you are looking at a variety of wines and/or styles. They also have the plus of being a hell of a lot easier to pour into if you are sharing one bottle with 15, 16 or 18 people in a tasting (or wine shop) environment as people invariably tend to over-pour into the larger glasses. Also; an awful lot easier to clean multiples of them!
That said, for home use, I use various other glasses which, as other posters have mentioned, give far greater pleasure.
They are a standardized glass. That eliminates one variable when tasting and evaluating wines. Are they the best for enjoyment, no; but when a group of tasters evaluate a multitude of wines, it’s helpful.
It isn’t just that they aren’t best for enjoyment, it is that they are lousy for evaluation as well. Eliminating a variable is a good thing in theory, it’s one reason why I often bring my own Gabriel Glas Golds to tastings. But I find ISOs to seriously impair my perception of a wines aromas, and I’ve tasted hundreds of wines from ISOs. It’s kind of like making each taster rub their chests with Vicks Vaporub to eliminate variations in ambient odors.
As others have said, one of the advantages is that they are ‘universal’ so the variability of glass shape/size is ruled out when comparing/contrasting wines in different settings.
That said, I purchased a set of these and used them when doing blind tastings - and was always amazed how different wines smelled and tasted out of more ‘universal’ red or white wine glasses. The differences would be so great that I would find a wine ‘boring’ and the person next to me would be ‘oohing and ahhing’ about the exact same wine.
As has been alluded to, the point of ISO is a standard. Many people would suggest quite a few (if not majority) of the ISO regulations are not necessary the best iterations of that particular thing - the wine glass definitely falls into that camp. What they do do, is provide a level which can be met relatively easily by many service/product providers and also provides an expectation for people who need a particular item delivered in a consistent way irrespective of the situation.
Even ISO, I do not think would begin to claim that the ISO tasting glass is an optimal vessel for pure enjoyment. It’s probably deemed an “appropriately acceptable” vessel for objective analysis when the cost of production, size and quantity requirements are taken into account. Those latter components are very important to the ISO process, and would be the make up of their “market need” analysis.
Whether the application of such regulation has merit with wine would start to devolve into the validity of objective tasting.
I think the big issue is that the wine world has come a long way since 1977, especially regarding stemware. It’s great that there is a standard. But the current standard is outdated and does not accomplish what it is meant to accomplish. Note, the category of the ISO is “sensory analysis”. The glass does a poor job of allowing the taster to analyze wine.
