My April 4^th Hot Home Products column in the New in Homes section (ya gotta buy the paper to get it!)  looks at what's new in wine glasses. Wine expert Konrad Ejbich, who answers listeners’ questions about wine on the last Friday of every month on CBC Radio’s Ontario Today program gave me some great tips for cleaning stemware, but I didn’t have room for them in the column. So I’m sharing them with you here instead. By the way, Konrad is getting ready to launch a new website called winezone.com.I’ll let you know when it goes live. In the meantime, here are those tips:

• Wash delicate stemware by hand, rather than the dishwasher. The spotting agent in dishwasher detergents tends to create a film on the glass that will affect taste and fragrance.

• Make sure there’s no other cutlery or dishes in the sink when you wash your stemware. Rinse glasses that come from the cupboard before serving wine in them to remove odours. Don’t believe there’s a whiff? Ejbich suggests you try this simple test. Take a clean glass, and hold it to your mouth before exhaling into it. Then take a sniff.

•  Konrad rinses glasses with a squirt of the wine he’ll be serving – a practice he calls “priming”.

There’s also a step-by-step cleaning guide under the information section of the Riedel site, as well as lots of information about shapes and styles of wine glasses.