A wine glass for every occasion: How to pick the perfect shape

Over the past decade, the top glass among wine lovers was the Zalto Denk’Art Universal — it was fundamentally different and radically better than other leading glasses.

In the past few years, however, several other high-end glasses have been challenging Zalto’s supremacy, all priced roughly $60 to $90 per glass.

Most wine drinkers, admittedly, will neither want nor need such rarefied glasses. But choosing wineglasses is a little like selecting a car: Even the least-expensive vehicle will get you where you want to go, but the trip is a different experience in the finest luxury car.

Competitors To The Zalto
The five glasses recommended include the Zalto Universal and four competitors: The Gabriel-Glas Gold Edition; the Wine Glass from the partnership of Jancis Robinson, a renowned British wine writer, and designer Richard Brendon; the Sensory Glass, designed by Roberto Conterno of the great Barolo producer Giacomo Conterno, in conjunction with Zwiesel Kristallglas, a German manufacturer. And lastly, there’s the Josephine Universal from Josephinenhütte, which has perhaps the most interesting back story. It was designed by Kurt Josef Zalto — that Zalto — who left his eponymous company a while ago.

“In order to grow faster, I made the compromise of accepting foreign investors into my company,” he told Forbes magazine in 2020. “I was pushed out and they kept the ‘Zalto’ name.”

A Sensual Pleasure To Hold
The Zalto itself is tall, like a Bordeaux glass, but rather than gently curving and arcing upward, it angles up abruptly and inward in a straight line. It’s impossibly thin and light, a sensual pleasure to hold. Most importantly, the aromas and flavours of the wine in the Zalto present themselves with clarity and intensity. The glass is a joy.

The Gabriel-Glas and the Jancis are very much in the Zalto mould. The Jancis has a slightly shorter stem, and the base of the bowl is more gently rounded and narrow. The Gabriel-Glas is wider at the base of the bowl and more abruptly angled inward. It is also the lightest of the glasses, almost feathery in the hand. The Jancis seems the most classically beautiful.

The Purpose Of An Unusual Shape
The Josephine resembles the Zalto, with one significant difference: The bowl bulges slightly around the lowest part of its circumference as if it had a circular love handle before beginning to taper toward the rim, in a gentle arc. What’s the purpose of this unusual shape? “When the wine is agitated in the glass, the kink breaks this movement and allows the wine to flow back into the belly in a spiral motion, ” a Josephinenhütte representative says, “In doing so, it absorbs additional oxygen.”

The last glass, the Conterno Sensory, is the real outlier. It is shaped like a classic Burgundy stem, shorter than the others with a much broader, rounder bowl, which tapers inward toward the rim before gently flaring upward.

In short, these are all wonderful glasses, gorgeous to look at and delightful to hold.