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*With apologies to ZZ Top — rest in peace, Dusty Hill
In an attempt to keep my kids from tearing each others’ hair out, last weekend we went shopping at a thrift store. My 12-year-old son recently got an old gaming console and a bunch of games, and wanted to find a controller (and more games, of course). My daughter, 14, was more interested in tracking down oversized button-up shirts, hoodies and sweaters in the men’s section.
Which left me to scour the shelves for one of my favourite thrift store finds — glassware.
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I’m the last person who should be buying more wine glasses — I’ve got more than I know what to do with already. In addition to the six smallish Zwilling J.A. Henckels glasses that are great for whites, I have five five (formerly six — oops) larger Luigi Bormioli red wine glasses — all very good and reasonably priced. That should be enough.
It ain’t. For my birthday a couple years back I received a Zalto universal glass as well as a Zalto Burgundy glass. Zaltos are the Ferraris of wine glasses — mouth-blown, lead-free crystal stemware made in Austria, and frighteningly thin and expensive. (The Burgundy glass is around $100 with taxes.)
For a long time I was almost too scared to use the Zaltos (think Ferris Bueller taking out Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari), but you only live once, and so I’ve started using them more often. Heck, I’ve even started putting them in the dishwasher, which apparently is safer than washing them by hand.
Beyond the Zaltos I’ve got all manner of random single glasses I’ve collected over the years in every shape and size you can imagine — which, for a guy who often tastes wine alone (for work purposes, of course), all seems like a bit much. (The beer glass situation, I’m afraid, is even worse.)
This isn’t too far off from what my glassware cabinet looks like. Yikes. (Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press files)
Miniature figurines fiends, salt and pepper shaker enthusiasts, rare vinyl hoarders — there are collectors aplenty out there scouring thrift stores for gems. For me I guess it’s wine glasses. If you’re looking for great deals and don’t need a full set of glasses, you can often find some real gems.
You need to know what you’re looking for, of course. The best wine glasses are typically thin crystal, are clear (ie. devoid of colour) and have a decent-sized bowl for swirling. Some of the better-known good-quality brands I look for while thrifting include Riedel, Spiegelau, Schott Zwiesel or Eisch, but there are plenty of nice off-brand stems out there to be found.
My big find — and I do mean big — was a pair of Eisch Vino Nobile “giant” glasses for the absolute steal of a price of eight bucks for the two. They retail new for $120 for six, and are comparable to Riedel’s sommelier series Burgundy glasses, which are over $100 a stem. Made in Germany of lead-free crystal, the Eisch glasses are truly giant — they stand over 25 centimetres tall and hold over a litre of liquid. That’s right — they can each hold an entire bottle of wine, which is ridiculous. (And not recommended, for fear of snapping the stems.)
Despite my own advice above, I lived on the edge and poured this entire Aussie Shiraz into my new-to-me Eisch glass. (It was then poured back into the bottle rather than consumed. Well, most of it at least.)
For fun (well, fun for me at least), I decided to do a taste test. I poured 60 ml of a California Cabernet Sauvignon into five different glasses — a Zwilling, a Riedel Ouverture Magnum glass, the Bormioli, the Zalto Burgundy and the Eisch to see which I’d prefer.
From left: The Zwilling J.A. Henckels, Riedel Ouverture Magnum, Luigi Bormioli, Zalto Burgundy and the Eisch Vino Nobile glasses, each with 60ml of Cabernet Sauvignon in them.
The Zalto and the Eisch provide the most amount of contact between the wine and oxygen, which softens up the mouth-drying tannins in a red and, when the wine is swirled, offers the best chance to pick up different aromatic components of a wine. By contrast the Zwilling, the smallest of the glasses, retained the most grippy tannins of the lot and was the least aromatic, no matter how much I swirled the stuff.
In this experiment, my favourite glass of the bunch was the Riedel, which balanced the fruit and tannin the best. This doesn’t surprise me — it has been my go-to workhorse wine glass for the better part of two decades. Thin but sturdy and with a nice short stem, I’ve loved and lost many Ouverture Magnums in my time, and tend to pick up new ones at The Bay when they (regularly) go on sale. They’re $35 for a pair regular price.
I’m certainly no snob when it comes to what vessel I use to drink my wine — I’ve enjoyed reds and whites from ‘70s-style goblets, coffee mugs at parties, plastic cups at the lake or even, in rare and less dignified circumstances, straight from the bottle.
The next time you find yourself thrift shopping, check out the glassware options — you never know what you might find. Well, other than countless tacky beer mugs. You’ll definitely find those.
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