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By Janice Kleinschmidt
 Courtesy Oneida Global Foodservice Oneida has partnered with Spiegelau to offer a line of luxury glasses designed to enhance the flavor of wine.
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As Linc Hayes memorably advised his Mod Squad cohorts, “Never drink champagne out of a paper cup.” Perhaps these days his admonition would be, “Never drink petite sirah out of a pinot noir glass.”
At least that’s what the 11-generation glassmaking Riedels would no doubt advise. A look at the glass guide on the company’s Web site may leave you dizzy without imbibing. Click on “petite sirah” and you’ll find that Riedel sells six appropriate glasses. Click on “pinot noir” and you’ll find a selection of nine glasses — none of which, apparently, are compatible with (or at least “recommended for”) petite sirah.
Ninth-generation Claus Riedel established the “form follows function” credo and ushered in the company’s first line of 10 wine glasses (the mouth-blown, handmade Sommeliers series) in 1973. Tenth-generation Georg Riedel mechanized the production of wine glasses suited to varietals with the less-expensive Vinum series. Now the Austrian company sells a dozen lines with differing methods of manufacture, i.e., whether the glass is machine made or handmade or machine made but hand-finished; whether it is 24 percent lead crystal or lead-free crystal; and whether the glass is constructed in three pieces or two. There’s even a line of stemless glasses, which defy the notion that it’s best not to alter a wine’s temperature with the warmth of your hand but which do fit nicely in a dishwasher and may be preferred by the accident-prone.
Riedel has gone so far as to create glasses suited not just to a particular grape, but also to a particular region. Most of those are for French wines; but last year, Riedel notably introduced an Oregon pinot noir glass. As that state’s wine industry has grown, vintners wondered how to get the world’s attention. In 1986, they debuted the International Pinot Noir Celebration.
“In the early 1990s, Georg Riedel came out and loved the event and said, ‘We will help supply glasses,’” says Alex Sokol Blosser, co-president of Sokol Blosser Winery. In the early 2000s, one vintner suggested Riedel, whose company makes varietal-specific glasses, make an Oregon pinot noir glass. At the celebration a couple years later, Riedel announced that he would, with help from Oregon vintners, create a new glass. “We reached out to winemakers to bring their pinot noir to a big tasting with Georg Riedel and drank pinot noir out of numerous Riedel glasses [of different sizes and shapes],” Sokol Blosser says. They preferred one glass for the way it focused the aromas and another glass for how it showed the wine on the palate.
Oregon vintners shipped some the area’s best pinot noirs to Riedel’s glassmaking facility in Austria. Sokol Blosser recalls testing the prototype glass about six months later. “I felt that the prototype he came up with accentuated the structure and the acid and the elegance that tend to be hallmarks of an Oregon pinot noir,” he says. The large-bowled, tulip-shaped glass with a slightly narrower, flared rim was introduced to the public in 2007.
While it’s easy to find disciples of the theory that Riedel glasses enhance the taste of wine (according to the company because each glass directs wine to the particular part of the tongue that will most appreciate the attributes of a specific varietal), the need for a library of glasses that require their own version of the Dewey Decimal System may be harder to swallow. After all, how many of us really have that sensitive of a palate — or, for that matter, that much room to spare in our cabinets?
San Francisco magazine offers a clue to who may comprise this class of librarians. Its June feature on the city’s wealth of wealthy residents describes the archetypal “retired” tech exec turned adventurer as someone who “owns every single type of Riedel glass.”
Some consider varietal-specific glasses nothing more than a marketing ploy: a nifty way to sell ever more glasses. Others are convinced the theory holds water — or, rather, wine.
“Riedel really has done a great job opening the door,” says Jorge Perez, spokesperson for Waterford Crystal in the United States. “It’s foolish for a crystal company not to be in the wine business now.”
Last year, Waterford partnered with pioneer winemaker Robert Mondavi to create a line of stemware “specially designed to enhance the flavor of a particular variety of wine” — though the Irish company limited the line to nine glasses: Burgundy, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, syrah, pinot noir, Bordeaux, fumé blanc, chardonnay, and Champagne. Mondavi and a team of designers tested 900 different shapes before selecting the final lineup.
According to Perez, it was an unprecedented collaboration for the company that designed the New York Times Square New Year’s ball (which, incidentally, got replaced with a new version to ring in 2008).
“We’re in a designer world now,” Perez says. “We’re the best in the world in our category of crystal. We went to the masters of wine where we felt they were the best.”
When Waterford solicited Mondavi’s expertise, it set three parameters: The glasses had to be designed to the company’s high standards, affordable, and “giftable.” (“The biggest part of our business is the bridal market,” Perez notes.)
Waterford sells wine glasses for the consumer classified as “the entertainer,” whom Perez defines as someone satisfied with all-purpose wine glasses. The Robert Mondavi Collection was created for “the enthusiast.”
“Once you get to that category, the glasses get more varietal-specific,” he says.
Although Mondavi died in May, Waterford has no intention of renaming the collection and, in fact, has yet to release seven decanters and 12 carafes developed in the collaboration (one decanter has been released). The company will debut individual carafes this fall and will offer a Robert Mondavi wine-tool kit gift-with-purchase during the holidays.
Eisch Glaskultur, a German company also with an impressive family heritage in glassmaking, captured would-be Riedel customers after it introduced a “breathable” glass at the 25th anniversary of the Robert Parker Wine Advocate Festival at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in 2004. The company claims that, because wines change from region to region and from year to year, having the technically perfect vessel for every bottle poured is less realizable than being able to impart an additional dimension to every wine drunk.
However, the company does make glasses of different shape — designated for red wine, white wine, Bordeaux, Burgundy, chardonnay, and Champagne. Then it goes a step further, putting high-quality lead crystal through a proprietary oxygenation process that it claims accelerates the aeration process. The “breathable” glass is supposed to make a just-opened wine within two to four minutes smell and taste like a wine that has been opened one to two hours (a big plus for restaurant dinners or impromptu entertaining). As with Riedel, comparison tastings have people — including master sommeliers and winemakers — swearing there’s a marked difference.
Unfortunately for Eisch, Riedel filed a lawsuit disputing the wording used in advertisements in the company’s home country. The lawsuit is still pending in German court, and neither side will comment on the case.
Also in Germany is Spiegelau, which has been in the glass business since the 16th century, when it catered to the royal courts. In December 2007, Oneida Global Foodservice (a sponsor of The Art of Food & Wine in Palm Desert) gained sole U.S. distribution rights for Spiegelau — giving Oneida entrée into the luxury wine glass market. The collection includes five lines of glasses in shapes designated for Burgundy, Bordeaux, chardonnay, Champagne, and Port, as well as glasses identified for “red wine” and “white wine” and a half-dozen decanters.
Riedel purchased Spiegelau in 2004, but maintains its status as purveyor of top-shelf glasses among individual wine connoisseurs. Spiegelau, which produces platinum glasses certified by an independent lab as “extremely dishwater safe,” are more often found in high-end restaurants and hotels (such as the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, the Four Seasons George V in Paris, and MGM Grand in Las Vegas).
If you think it’s all too confusing, take this sound advice: Try whatever glasses you like. Buy whatever glasses you like. And never drink champagne out of a paper cup.
She Blinded Me With Science
“What’s a white wine doing in my red wine glass?”
That was my initial reaction when I sat down at a Riedel tasting at Morton’s the Steakhouse in Palm Desert. On the one hand, it seems odd to say a “Riedel tasting” when, in fact, we were not licking glasses but were tasting wines in Riedel glasses. On the other hand, that’s the point the company and its devotees make: A Riedel glass dramatically changes the taste of wine, so calling it a “Riedel tasting” would be valid.
OK, I’m a bit of a fence sitter on this issue. That is, I have long recognized the benefits of a white wine glass, a red wine glass, and, most importantly, a flute for sparkling wine. However, I’m not entirely convinced that there’s not at least a little brainwashing going on when it comes to the subtlest differences. Scientific testing has proven time and again that if we are told to expect a particular result (i.e., pain and pleasure), those expectations override reality (thus the placebo effect).
But back to the white-wine-in-a-red-glass issue. In front of me were four glasses of wine, each in a decidedly distinct Riedel glass. The placemat on which they sat identified them as a chardonnay, a Riesling, a pinot noir, and a cabernet/merlot glass. As indicated, the chardonnay glass had a round bowl. Riedel claims this shape steers the wine of Burgundian-style wine to the sour-sensitive edges of the tongue to ensure the acidity is emphasized enough to balance a full-bodied, oak-aged wine. The company makes more traditionally shaped white wine glasses for Chablis and New World chardonnays.
Without going into the details of each glass, here’s the gist of how the tasting went. Riedel representative Dana Ginavan instructed us to first taste a wine in its proper glass and then to pour it into one of the other glasses for comparison. As you can imagine, this became something of a juggling act until a wine was finished, but was manageable with the stemless plastic glass they called the “joker” glass. We were supposed to pour the wines also into the plastic glass for comparison, but I’ve been to enough parties to know that wine NEVER tastes as good in a plastic cup.
You could call it brainwashing, but I swear the Riesling lost its power in the chardonnay glass, though I didn’t think the chardonnay in the Riesling glass was too bad. The red wines fared better in their respective glasses, so overall I was impressed. But, particularly when our financial institutions are crumbling, I don’t think a house addition to accommodate a full supply of differently shaped glasses is it the cards. Certainly, I could limit myself to one type of wine all the time, but that’s not going to happen
• For more on wine or to find local wine dinners, events, and tastings, click here.
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