Fathers Day Gifts – Admire Magazine September 2016

We often spend quite a bit of money on a decent bottle of wine and then use cheap glasses to drink it from so if your dad enjoys a nice glass of wine then I think he would really appreciate some beautiful glassware to drink from.

You can spend hundreds of dollars on beautiful hand-blown glassware from producers like Riedel who have a range of glasses designed to extract the most enjoyment possible from every style of wine but you can also buy quality glassware for about $15 per glass.

And it isn’t just limited to wine, drinking port, whiskey or even a cocktail from beautiful glassware turns the function of drinking into a much more pleasurable experience.

For me I prefer a glass with a cut rim not a rim that has a rounded lip and if you want to use your sense of sight and see what you are drinking then a good wine glass should be plain crystal, not cut with a pattern or coloured; a really good wine glass should look plain but feel wonderful when you drink from it.

While Riedel make a range of glassware that looks great and is perfect to drink from glasses also need to look the part; some from their range are beautifully crafted works of art (especially their decanters) while producers like LSA are all about design with a Scandinavian look and they just happen to be highly functional as well.

If you are a pet owner or the owner of a rug rat or two then stemless glasses are worth considering too, these have the same bowl shape as a standard wine glass but, as the name suggests, without a stem making them less likely to be knocked over. Most wine glasses can be put in a dishwasher and the stemless glass makes this much easier.

Delightful LSA hand-blown stemless glasses will cost you around $120 for a set of four at Stevens Homeware but they are often on special for about half that.

For the really serious wine-loving-dad I think you should make the effort to buy a glass designed to make the most of his favourite wine; for example if he loves Shiraz then you can buy glasses specifically the variety, the shape of the glass is designed to ensure when you take a sip the wine is delivered to different parts of your tongue at the right time.

Sounds a bit crazy but with the Shiraz glass the wine hits the part of your tongue that senses the sweet, ripe fruit first followed by the part that detects acidity so the fruit flavour has a juicy character and then as the wine works its way around the rest of your mouth you sense the tannins in the wine leaving you with a nice dry finish.

The same principle applies to every shape of glass Riedel produce and while it takes an expert palate to detect the difference between say a Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon glass if you try drinking a wine from a small glass and then try it from a larger rimmed glass you will notice the difference, it can be really surprising the difference it makes.

A good bottle of wine might cost you $30 to $100 plus but a set of nice glasses could cost you as little as $50 and they will add enjoyment to every bottle of his favourite wine.

The other really great thing about buying nice glassware is that every time your dad drinks from it he will think of the person who gave it to him so the memory of your gift will last a lot longer than the time it takes to drink a nice bottle of wine.

Check the range of specialist wine glassware available at Casa del Vino, Prego, Stevens and Fresh Choice Richmond.