As a child in rural Austria, Kurt Josef Zalto would often accompany his father, a fifth-generation glassmaker, to his workshop, where he fell in love with the family business.
“In a village like that, glass is not a product,” he said. “It is the sound of the furnaces, the smell of the workshop, the work of your father and your neighbors.”
Thirty years later, Mr. Zalto is one of the world’s leading glassware designers, renowned for his ability to combine craftsmanship and science, relentlessly tweaking a design to achieve the perfect sip.
“A few millimeters at the rim, a slightly different curve in the bowl, and the same liquid tells you a different story,” he said. “After all these years, that still surprises me every time.”
Mr. Zalto built his reputation designing wine glasses. A few years ago, he decided to shift his attention to what has long been an overlooked corner of glass design: whiskey.
Mr. Zalto and his team at Josephinenhütte, the luxury German glassware company where he is the lead designer, spent three years working through scores of prototypes to arrive at what he considers the optimal shape for whiskey, especially high-alcohol, robust styles like bourbon and rye.
The new glass, which the company released on Wednesday, has a wide base, which creates a broad surface area that allows alcohol and the complex compounds that make up whiskey’s rich aromas to evaporate. A pinch at the waist concentrates the vapors, which then pour upward and over a rim flared just so, letting the alcohol — and only the alcohol — dissipate.
“In wine, you mostly try to bring the aromas to you,” Mr. Zalto said. “In whiskey, you first have to deal with the alcohol, and only then can the aromas speak.”
The glass comes in two versions, No. 11, which sits on a stem, and No. 12, which is stemless. A slightly different shape, No. 13, will come out in the spring.
Every wine grape seems to have its own unique glass these days. But until recently, drinkers took their whiskey in whatever was handy — a brandy snifter, a wine glass, a tumbler — even though whiskey’s high alcohol content and robust concentration of tastes and smells begged for a glass of its own.
The experience of sticking one’s nose in a whiskey glass only to get walloped by a hit of ethanol is one reason many people never develop a taste for the spirit.
“There is a masking effect with ethanol,” said Keith R. Cadwallader, a food scientist at the University of Illinois. “The first smell is OK, but after 30 seconds, there’s nothing.”
Even setting the alcohol aside, the shape of a glass affects how different aromas reach the nose, in both order and intensity. The same whiskey will smell significantly different when served in different glasses.
“It’s like if you play your favorite record — the glass is the sound system you play it through,” said Emerson Shotwell, a whiskey expert and musician who is also a brand ambassador for Josephinenhütte.
It was not until 2001 that the Glencairn company, a crystal manufacturer in Scotland, introduced the world’s first whiskey-specific glass. The Glencairn, as the glass became known, revolutionized whiskey drinking. Its distinctive tulip shape and compact size offered an effective delivery system for single-malt Scotch.
“It allows the aromas to build up,” said Scott Davidson, who runs Glencairn with his brother Paul. “With a tumbler, there’s lots of evaporation.”
Today it is the industry standard. Walk into any decent whiskey bar or tour a whiskey distillery, and chances are you’ll be handed a Glencairn.
But the glass also has its detractors, especially in the United States. What works for a delicate, lower-alcohol single malt, they say, can be overwhelmed by a high-powered bourbon; the Glencairn’s tulip shape becomes a chimney, packing alcohol vapors into a boozy punch to the nose.
“I will make enemies, but I don’t like it,” said Flavien Desoblin, the owner of two whiskey bars in Manhattan, the Brandy Library and Dram Central.
Instead, his bars use a stemless, wide-bodied Chardonnay glass made by Riedel, which he says does a better job of balancing alcohol and aroma.
Mr. Zalto is not the first person to try to engineer a better whiskey glass. In 2011 George Manska, an industrial designer, introduced the NEAT glass, which looks like a squat, exaggerated Glencairn, but with a heavy flare and a wide rim. (The name is an acronym for Naturally Engineered Aroma Technology.)
While not as widely used as the Glencairn, the NEAT has its partisans, like Bethne Stewart, a bartender at the Portrait Bar at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York and the first woman in the United States to pass the Master of Bourbon exam.
“It gets the aromatics up,” she said. “I wouldn’t want the mouth to be tighter; otherwise I’d get punched in the face by alcohol.”
Still, Mr. Zalto felt there was room for improvement.
“We wanted to find out if a glass could take the edge off the alcohol without making the whiskey go quiet,” he said. “That balance is very difficult, because almost every shape that reduces ethanol also takes away some intensity. Nobody had really solved this.”
He drew heavily on his experience with wine glasses. Fans of his Josephine wine glass, with its distinctive kink at the waist, will recognize its influence on his whiskey glass, which has a similarly proportioned pinch.
“The bend in the Josephine bowl is there to lead the wine in a certain way when you swirl, so the aromas open in the right order,” he said. “That idea, that every curve has to have a reason, I brought directly into the whiskey glass.”
And while he wants everyone to use his glass, Mr. Zalto says it is especially attuned to bourbon and rye, as well as high-proof whiskeys of all sorts. “A whiskey at 43 percent and a cask-strength whiskey at 60 percent behave completely differently in the same glass,” he said.
Having settled on a few finalists, Mr. Zalto took them on a tour of the United States, visiting bars, distilleries and whiskey clubs for feedback.
Drew Kulsveen, the master distiller at the Willett Distillery in Kentucky, was especially impressed.
“After tasting different whiskeys from a range of glasses, this one stood out by far,” he said. “It brought out the most flavor, delivered the best experience on the palate and gave the longest, most complete finish.”
Mr. Zalto does not expect his glass to displace the Glencairn, which he concedes is a cost-effective, sturdy and reliable option for day-to-day service at whiskey bars. Rather, he’d like to see it as a part of a whiskey bar’s tool kit, in the same way a wine bar will have a variety of glassware.
“Nobody in a good restaurant serves Champagne, riesling and an old Barolo in the same glass,” he said. “If in some years a serious whiskey bar offers a choice of glasses the way a good restaurant offers a choice of wine glasses, I will be very happy.”
