09/03/2025
Zoe enjoying Nabeshima in the most elegant sake glass in the world! 🍶🌏
The Sophienwald Sake Glass is specially designed to enjoy sake at its best. Designed in collaboration with Simon Hofstra, the Dutch Sake Samurai. The project started late 2021 to create the best sake glass in the world. The final design was approved spring 2024 and sales launch of this unique glass started autumn 2024.
This mouthblown glass handmade by the famous Austrian glassmaker Sophienwald is the ultimate sake glass with a heigh of 22,5 cm and a weight of only 101 grams.
It brings out the best flavours of Junmai, Ginjo and Daiginjo and makes the taste and texture more balanced.
After first analysing the ten best-known existing sake glasses for their strengths and weaknesses, a number of wine glasses were selected that were widely used for sake in the hospitality industry. During the tasting sessions, we then looked at which forms of glassware make sake stand out best. Then the design, weight, thickness of the glass, height of the stem, width of the base and the possibility of using the glass for wine arrangements were examined.
Each of these has been worked out separately to complete the glass. For example, the glass is made so that the curvature starts at 120 millilitres so that it is a full glass at 120 ml. Normally six glasses go out of a bottle with a wine pairing, but since a wine bottle has a capacity of 750 ml divided by 6 is 150 ml per glass, 120 ml has been chosen since a sake bottle normally contains 720 ml.
The lighter the glass, the finer in the hand, the wide bottom in the glass ensures that it can be rolled beautifully. The height not only provides elegance, but also makes the human hand less easy to smell. The wide base ensures that the glass is more stable and does not easily fall over. The thin glass ensures that the sake ends up at the front of the tongue so that it spreads over the entire taste palate.
Then in the end, despite the glass looking very fragile, it is way stronger and less easy to break than common machine-made wine glasses.
Kanpai to Sophienwald! 🥂
