Whether you’re at the beach or on your deck, a wine tumbler can keep your drink cold and spill-free. With so many options, which is best?
Published June 30, 2021. Appears in America's Test Kitchen TV Season 23: Puerto Rican Cookout
We tested eight different wine tumblers. Our top pick was the Swig Stemless Wine Cup (12 oz), which kept wine cold for almost 5 hours and had an impressively leakproof lid.
A glass of cold white wine on the beach is one of life’s simple pleasures. But it’s not so pleasurable if your chilled wine becomes tepid or another beachgoer throws a football at your glass and your wine soaks into the sand. Enter wine tumblers: sturdy, insulated cups that promise to keep your wine colder and safer than it would be in a wine glass—come hell, high water, or an overzealous beachgoer with a football. And even if you’re not braving the beach, our winning wine tumbler will keep bugs out of your wine on the back porch and make drinking chilled wine anywhere a pleasurable experience.
We tested eight wine tumblers, seven made of stainless steel, one made of borosilicate glass, and all but one equipped with lids. The lidded tumblers varied, with some that had only holes for sipping and others that had sliding pieces to cover the sipping holes. All but one of the tumblers we tested kept wine cold for hours (versus a standard wine glass, which kept wine cold for 40 minutes), but they differed in durability, how comfortable they were to hold and sip from, and how much they leaked. Most didn’t claim to be leakproof, though our winner did not leak at all. We also discovered that insulated tumblers make for fabulous ice cream bowls—perhaps not their intended use but still a good one.
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