Clear is pretty obvious, you want to see the color of the wine. Some whites tend to get more golden in color as they age, and some red wines, particularly Cabernet and Merlot-based wines, will acquire a brickish red hue as they get older. A brownish color may indicate that the wine is either corked or has been too warm and is, as we say in the biz, "Madeirized." Take one small sip of Madeira and you will see what I mean about what happens when wine gets too hot. One sip is worth a thousand words.

And some wines, such as those Zinfandel-based wines from Ridge Vineyards, have such a saturated purple color they are just fun to look at.

Round glasses that are slightly tapered at the top are best for most wines. This shape helps you swirl the wine in the glass. Swirling the wine is not some wine snob's idea of a parlor trick, it has a reason. Wine changes in the presence of oxygen and by swirling the wine, especially young wines, you bring out the aromas as well as the fruit flavors. The swirling also tends to let some of the oak and tannin dissipate, or "blow off" if you are a wine snob, and it brings the wine into balance.

One hates to perpetuate a stereotype here, but bigger is usually better. The larger the size of the bowl of the glass, the more swirling and whiffing and sniffing you can do. Scoff if you will, but I have taken the same bottle of wine and put it into two separate glasses and you would swear you were drinking two very different bottles of wine.

If you have an enormous amount of time and money at your disposal, you can buy really expensive stemware that needs to be very carefully handwashed. There is even stemware that is designed for each type of grape, and admittedly, you can make a case for separate glasses for red and white wine, but isn't life just a little bit too short for that?

For the rest of us, most stores where you find glassware should have affordable glasses that are large enough to do justice to the wine and sturdy enough to take machine washing.

Champagne should be served in the thin, tapered glasses called "flutes." The bowl-shaped glasses that often are associated with Champagne supposedly were modeled after the size of Marie Antoinette's breast. Given how much I like Champagne, it's too bad Pamela Anderson wasn't the queen of France. Those bowl-shaped glasses allow the bubbles to disappear too quickly and the bubbles are the whole point of Champagne.

For those of us who already have clear glasses, take a look at a glass of Marietta Old Vine red and then give it a swirl.

• John DeCherney can be contacted at wine@acsalaska.net.