Swirling the Truth - More legs = Better wine?

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Hi, welcome to episode two of Swirling the Truth, Wine Debunked with Jamie, here at Cooper Sock Vineyard.

Today we're going to be talking about legs in your wine, or some people refer to them as tears. You know when you swirl a glass and you see these lines coming down your glass, you can see them right there.

A lot of people think that this is a measure of quality, that if you have long legs like you're seeing here, that that must mean it's a really high quality wine. But in fact it has nothing to do with quality. Wine legs come from something called the Marangoni effect, which you can google, but essentially when you swirl the glass you're putting a thin layer of the wine on here and alcohol evaporates really fast and so what's happening is the surface tension changes and it's actually pulling wine up the glass and then gravity's pulling it back down. It's actually really cool.

Now why does that happen? Well it's because of alcohol. So, the higher your alcohol the longer your legs are going to be, the faster that they're going to form. And you can see with this wine that when we swirl it we don't get very good legs, but this one has a lower alcohol percentage. So this is 10.5% and this is 13.5%. You can also get legs from high sugar wines because they become more viscous, so you might also see good legs with sweet wines, but it's not a measure of quality. 

So hope you guys learned something today. See you next week!