Surely one of the most mythologised aspects of wine drinking.
The ‘legs’ of wine are the droplets that form along the edge of your glass when you swirl a wine. Some believe that the appearance of them reflects the quality of the wine in the glass.
So, what do they really tell you about a wine?
The reality is that those legs tell you relatively little about the wine and nothing about its quality. However, the myth lives on because of the real reason wine legs appear – and how difficult it can be to explain.
It’s essentially down to a process known as ‘Marangoni flows’. Legs are formed due to a combination of different forces, namely surface tension forces and intermolecular forces. Essentially caused by the gradual evaporation of alcohol in a water/alcohol solution.
So basically, the only information that legs offer is that your wine contains alcohol. But you don’t need legs to tell you that.