Yesterday’s post on opportunities for sparkling SA Sauvignon was no doubt picked up by the Riedel glassware empire as a chance for a new glass design, especially when Business Day’s entrepreneurial wine pundit, Michael Fridjhon, is their busy local agent. Just what shape would those glassy gnomes come up with to showcase the terroir of sparkling Sauvignon? And they’d sure come in handy at Vinimark’s planned Sommelier Competition that is being widely rumoured in the spittoon.

quite interesting

Of course the bubbles have nothing to do with the shape of the glass but everything to do with how clean it is. Urban legend used to contend that it was the roughness of the glass that caused the turbulence necessary to liberate bubbles but The Book of General Ignorance (Faber & Faber, 2006) reports that “new photographic techniques have shown that these nicks and grooves are much too small for bubbles to latch on to” and rather “it’s the microscopic particles of dust and bits of fluff in the glass that enable them to form.” So Pieter Ferreira, don’t clean the Graham Beck tasting room in Franschhoek too well for Friday’s Brut Zero MCC tasting!