Red or white...

How many wine glasses does one person need?  Recently, I organized a client's kitchen, and in the process, we removed dozens and dozens of wine glasses from the cabinets.  My client was amazed to see how many wine glasses he had accumulated over a few years.  They were tucked into every corner of every cabinet, mostly coated with dust.



How does this happen?  A couple of parties and before you know it, you are the owner of dozens of wine glasses.  And especially in California, you're suppose to have glasses for every kind of wine you might serve...white, red, rose, dessert, sparkling, port, etc.

So, how do you decide how many is too many?  How much space for storing glasses do you have?  How often are you going to use all the glasses?  Can you use a "generic" glass and serve whatever wine in them?  Can you borrow glasses from a friend if you needed to?  All these are questions you have to answer when you are deciding how much glassware you want to own.  

Personally, I have 4 red, 4 white and 4 champagne glasses.  That covers the maximum number of sit down guests I can fit into my condo.  If I have more people, I borrow glassware from a neighbor.  

When we put my client's kitchen back together, this is how many glasses he decided to keep.

Here's a great article about choosing wine glasses from The Wine Doctor:

"I suspect most wine drinkers could quite adequately get by with just two or three different types of wine glasses. I would suggest as starting point the three types of wine glasses mentioned above - a standard glass for whites, something a little larger, perhaps, for reds, and of course a flute or similar style for Champagne or sparkling wine."