The wine legs tend to form easier in tannic red wines with higher alcohol, and richly sweet wines. Credit: David Silverman / Getty Images News
‘In all the tastings I host, I get more questions about wine legs than any other topic,’ says Matt Walls, Decanter World Wine Awards’ Regional Chair for the Rhône. ‘It’s surely one of the most mythologised aspects of wine drinking.’
Believed by many to be a sign of quality, wine legs are in fact the innocent outcome of a physical phenomenon, determined by the wine’s chemical composition and affected by external factors such as temperature, humidity and pouring vessel.
What are wine legs?
Wine legs, also sometimes called ‘wine tears’ and ‘cathedral arches’ are droplets that form on the inside of a glass after you’ve swirled and liquid resettles to the bottom.
Some believed that the glycerol and the viscosity of the wine contributed to wine legs, but scientists have proven that alcohol plays a far more important role in forming these trickles of liquid.
What happens is, that a thin film of liquid is attached to the inside surface of the glass once swirled. When the alcohol, with a lower surface tension than water, starts to evaporate from this liquid veil, water and other molecules (such as tannins and sugar) form drops that then fall back into the glass forming the trail described as wine legs.
As Jane Anson puts it in a previous Decanter Magazine article, ‘When you swirl wine in your glass, alcohol
