Last night, Mrs. Dudette, the Dudelette and I tried out a relatively new family-dining-style BYO Italian bistro in our area.  Just about everything at this new-ish joint was very, very good – from the friendly service right on through to the tasty, looks-like-it-just-came-out-of-grandma’s-kitchen pasta. 

I say “just about everything” because, as you will see in the inset pic (with apologies from me including crappy-ass cellphone shots here), when I pulled out out BYO wines, the restaurant handed me a nice metal “waiter’s friend” style corkscrew (I want one!), along with two wine “glasses” that looked as though they’d serve better duty as flower vases.

Are those glasses pretty?  You bet.  Are they decent glasses for drinking wine?  No way.

I’m not trying to be a wine snob here (it comes naturally after a while!) – you’re reading the words of someone who regularly tries wines out of small plastic cups at outdoor events (you can take the kid out of Elsmere, but you’ll never take the Elsmere out of the kid, baby!) – but trying to get a sense of a wine and really enjoy it out of these things was just about impossible.  Even our potentially kick-ass dinner wine selections (Matthiasson releases – and we all know those folks know what they’re doing because they’re getting mentioned here on an almost weekly basis now) tasted downright pedestrian from those things.  We probably would have had better luck tasting them from our daughter’s sippy-cup (seen in the background).

For my tastes, those vase-glasses have a rim that’s way to wide and so thick that it dumps the wine into your mouth at a strange angle.  All that pretty carving action? No way to really dig on the wine’s color and clarity through that stuff.  The goblet style shape?  More suitable to specialty beer brews than wine – give me a tulip-shaped glass any day.

Think the Dude doth protest too much?  Had a head-on run-in with restaurant wine glasses?  Shout it out in the comments!

Cheers!

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