The Fine Dining Drinking Rule That Makes No Sense

For many of us, visiting a winery or an upscale bar is just another opportunity to socialize while enjoying a drink or two. However, when it comes to wine etiquette, there are a few things you might want to at least keep in mind, lest a wine snob glare at you for the rest of the night.

Just as it's important to use the right glasses to drink wine and to hold your wine glass properly, it's also considered to be in good taste to drink your wine a certain way. Yes, wine etiquette really goes so far as to tell you how to drink wine from your glass. Even more specifically, etiquette would say you should drink from the same spot on your glass.

In an interview with Food & Wine, etiquette expert Myka Meier explained, "When you drink, you want to drink from the same place on the glass every time to avoid that lip ring, whether it's from natural oils or chapsticks or lipstick." That being said, others say this particular rule could have less to do with smudges along the rim of your glass and more to do with scent. You could have the best wine and the best wine glasses, but allowing your lips to have contact with the glass in too many places could leave a lingering scent. Whether it's from bad breath or cherry lip gloss, scent can affect how the wine tastes.

Though experts say lip smudges on a wine glass can affect the scent — and by proxy, the taste — of your wine, how true is this? According to Dr. Steven Lin, more than 50 million Americans suffer from bad breath, which can smell fishy, cheesy, fruity, acidic, musty, etc. No matter how your breath smells, our senses of smell and taste are connected. If you've sipped your wine from a dozen different spots, the scent of dried saliva could emphasize a bad smell. We've all experienced how a bad smell negatively affects our perception of how something tastes. That being said, if you're among the group of Americans who don't suffer from bad breath, you probably won't have this issue.

At the end of the day, though, it's only a glass of wine, and you can drink it any way you choose. After all, not everyone is a wine connoisseur trying to pick out individual flavor notes. Also, not everyone drinks out in public. You might choose to be at home chilling in your pajamas and drinking cheap wine from a sparkly glass you got for your 21st birthday. If that's the case, you probably don't care about lip smudges on your wine glass or etiquette. You might not even care how wine tastes if it gets you buzzed. We can't argue with that.