[troutman]

https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/wine-glass-placebo/

Do different wines really need different glasses? Does the shape of a glass actually affect taste? Or is this a new kind of snake oil being sold to the aspirational set eager to convince others of their olfactory prowess?

In 2000, two scientists set out to test the hypothesis and the proceeds were published in 2002 in the Journal of Sensory Studies. Jeannine Delwiche and Marcia Pelchat of the Monell Chemical Senses Center gave subjects four glasses to smell and drink from with the same wine in them: a square-shaped crystal water goblet, a standard, cheap restaurant wine glass, a Riedel Chardonnay glass, and a Riedel Bordeaux glass.
They created a nifty blindfold out of goggles, to prevent the aesthetics of each glass from interfering in the way the subjects judged the smell and taste of the wine, and they also created a chin-rest, to control for distance from the glass.

Their conclusion was not good news for Riedel. “For the intensity ratings of most attributes, no significant difference was found between the glasses,” they write. (There was, bizarrely, a difference between the way men and women rated the “mustiness” of the wines; women rated it higher than the men.) Otherwise, “The only significant finding was that likers of red wine gave higher liking ratings than did dislikers of red wine, which is as one would expect.” There was a small difference in intensity that the subjects registered—the aroma of the wine from the Bordeaux glass registered as “less intense,” probably because it is taller, and the wine further from the nose. But overall, they concluded, “None of the correlations are significant.”