Minisode #6: The Myth About Legs on Wine

Show Notes

Minisode #6: The myth about legs on wine

Hi everyone, and welcome to this next mini-episode of The Wine Pair Podcast! I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and my wine pairing partner in crime Carmela. And we are The Wine Pair.

If you are new to The Wine Pair Podcast, these minisodes are just shorter versions of the podcast that we put on weeks where we might be traveling or handling other life stuff, and instead of tasting and reviewing three wines under $20 that are easy to find, which is what we usually do in our longer episodes, in the minisodes, we focus more on things like wine etiquette, wine education, and wine tips. And, we try to make it fun and understandable to regular, everyday people like us! And our podcast is recommended by Decanter magazine. So there!

In this minisode, we are going to talk about legs, sometimes also called tears, on wine, what they are, and if they matter.

Carmela, have you ever seen someone do this: grab a glass of wine, swirl it around, watch the wine cling to the side of the glass and drip down into the bowl and then give a satisfied or sometimes a concerned look? Well, they are looking at the legs of the wine. I have seen this many times. I have even heard people say - ooh, look at the legs on this wine.

Carmela, when people talk about legs on a wine, what do you think they generally mean? That’s right, some people believe that the more prominent or "thicker" the legs are, the higher the quality or age of the wine. However, this is not necessarily true.

This is a myth, Carmela. A myth! Not a hit but a myth. The myth about legs on wine is that they are an indicator of a wine’s quality. Well, friends, we are here to disabuse you of that false information. Legs do indicate some aspects of the wine that have to do with its chemistry and some stuff about physics, but seeing legs on a wine, or judging a wine by how thick or long or sticky its legs are is just not a thing. The quality of legs on a wine has zero, and I mean zero, zilch, none, nada to do with how good the wine is or how old the wine is or if you should expect a great wine experience.

Now, what are legs, or tears, or cathedral arches, which they are also called, in wine? Without getting too technical, and we do have an article from Decanter in our show notes for this minisode that goes into more of the technical aspects, legs have to do with the alcohol content in a wine, the surface tension of liquid on glass, and gravity. That sounds like a lot of geeky wine stuff. And it is!

In the simplest terms, when you pour wine into a glass, some of the wine coats the sides of the glass, and some of the alcohol in the wine immediately starts to evaporate, which leaves behind thicker and more viscous liquid.  In nerdy scientific terms, this is called the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. 

Now, what the hell is the Gibbs-Marangoni effect? From a great article from Usual Wines that we have a link to in our show notes, they explain that it states that liquids with different surface tensions will always move away from each other. Because wine is made up of alcohol and water, the wine and the water, which are two different liquids with different surface tensions, move away from each other in your wine glass. Weird, right? It’s like when you had two different friend groups in high school that you tried to put together - they just kind of automatically moved apart from each other. 

When the wine coats the inside of your wine glass, liquid is pulled down by gravity. But, because alcohol has a higher evaporation point than water, the Gibbs-Marangoni effect causes the water to push upward and away from the more alcoholic wine below. And this causes legs. How about that?

Wines with higher alcohol content tend to have thicker or wider legs, while wines with lower alcohol content tend to have thinner legs. Legs are also affected by the temperature and by humidity which can affect how quickly the alcohol evaporates, and legs are affected by the shape of the glass. Glasses with narrower openings at the top will tend to create more prominent legs due to the increased surface area of the glass. So, if you are trying to impress someone who thinks legs on wine mean something, just use wine glasses with a tapered, narrow opening. 

But, you shouldn’t do that because, again, what do legs have to do with the quality of wine? Absolutely nothing. Sorry if that is something you have been leaning on to tell if a wine is good. As the Decanter article says, the only way to understand the quality of a wine is to smell and taste it. That’s it. 

But now you know that if you hear someone saying that the wine they are swirling in their glass has legs, you can tell them what those legs are and why they don’t matter. 


Articles and Links

• https://www.winemag.com/2020/11/03/wine-legs-mean-good/
• https://www.decanter.com/learn/advice/do-wine-legs-mean-a-better-wine-ask-decanter-376032/ 
• https://home.binwise.com/blog/wine-legs 
• https://usualwines.com/blogs/knowledge-base/wine-legs 

Ok, that’s it for this minisode. Check out our other minisodes and our regular episodes to learn more which you can find on our website or your favorite podcast service. You can follow us on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast or you can visit our website thewinepairpodcast.com and in any of those places you can reach out to us directly, and you can send us an email at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com. We also will have our show notes on our website, and we will include links to articles on this topic as well. 

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