After years of back and forth with a small army of marketing and public-relations people, I finally got what I'd been looking for: a chance to sit down with Maximilian Riedel and debunk the "theory" behind his famous wine glasses.Riedel is to stemware what Porsche is to cars -- it's seen as the pinnacle of design and performance, and priced accordingly. Riedel, an Austrian company that has been in the glass business since the 1700s, pioneered the notion that the size and shape of a wine glass can significantly affect one's enjoyment of wine.
Over the years, Riedel has developed dozens of different glasses, each tailored to a specific type of wine -- Bordeaux and Burgundy, chardonnay and riesling, port and sherry, and so on. At anywhere from $12 to $120 a stem, a full complement of Riedel glasses can cost as much as a good-sized wine cellar.
But I, for one, was skeptical of the Riedel mystique. I'd read the literature about how the curvature of the glass and diameter of the rim could optimize the bouquet and channel the wine to the appropriate quadrants of the palate. I was aware that Robert Parker, publisher of the Wine Advocate newsletter and perhaps the most influential voice in wine, hailed Riedel as "the finest glasses for both technical and hedonistic purposes," adding, "I cannot emphasize enough what a difference they make."
I even had a set of Riedel glasses at home -- not because I believed all the hype, but because they're very nice to look at. But did they really make a difference?
I had always taken a pragmatic view of stemware. As long as the glass was large enough and round enough so you could give the contents a vigorous swirl, then it was suitable for appreciating fine wine. The idea that one glass could be right for cabernet sauvignon but wrong for pinot noir struck me as absurd. I had long wanted to test the glasses with Riedel himself because I was entirely confident the experience would confirm my suspicions.
Thanks to the intervention of a capable publicist, Maximilian Riedel agreed to meet me at Bin 14 Trattoria and Wine Bar in Hoboken. I arrived right on time, but Riedel was already seated at the front table wearing an impeccably tailored beige suit with a blue shirt and a bold blue necktie.
In front of me was a white paper placemat with the Riedel logo and five large circles marking the spots for five wine glasses: Riedel's Montrachet glass, for appreciating the finest chardonnays; a Riesling Grand Cru glass, designed for the best German wines; a large glass made for pinot noir; an even larger goblet for cabernet sauvignon; and a basic wine glass that would serve as a control for our little experiment. The spot for the control glass was marked "joker."
Born and raised in Austria, Maximilian Riedel is the 11th generation of his family to be in the glass trade. At 31, he has lived in the United States for nearly a decade, heading the company's North American operations, which are based in New Jersey. Exceptionally well mannered and speaking perfect English, he wasted no time getting down to business.
"I discovered this beautiful pinot noir, which I want to taste first in the pinot noir glass, then in the joker glass," he says as he pours a small amount of wine into the pinot noir glass, which stands about 10 inches high and has a total capacity of nearly a quart.
"How much wine do you recommend pouring into your glasses?" I ask.
"Three to four ounces is a good amount," he says. The idea, he explained, is to give the wine a chance to breathe by swirling it around the large vessel.
He was right -- it was an excellent pinot noir, from a small California winery I'd never heard of. And I had to admit, it was kind of fun sniffing and sipping from such a large, beautifully shaped glass, which tapers toward the top, then flares out slightly. But I remained confident that there would be no discernible difference between Riedel's very expensive pinot noir glass and the utility glass, which you could buy for a few dollars at Target.
When he poured the pinot noir into the "joker" glass, the first thing I noticed was the alcohol. Whereas all I smelled in the pinot noir glass was a lusciously fruity bouquet, the same wine in the smaller glass smelled sharply of alcohol.
"The fruit is subtle," Riedel says of the bouquet in the joker glass. "There's a little bit of a burn in the nose." No, there was a lot of burn in the nose. And that wasn't all. The wine tasted flat. Was my palate playing tricks on me? Not at all, Riedel says.
"Hold your glass over on its side until the wine comes just to the edge," he says, demonstrating the move for me. "Now, try it with the pinot noir glass."
There was a clear difference: The shape of the joker glass allowed wine to spill broadly across the tongue and the sides of the mouth, whereas the pinot noir glass channeled the wine to the tip of the tongue.
"We taste acidity along the sides of our mouth and sweetness on the tip of the tongue," Riedel says. "We want to direct a high-acid wine like pinot noir to the tip of the tongue, so you can really taste the fruit."
I went back and forth between the two glasses, and there was no question: The pinot noir smelled and tasted dramatically better in the pinot noir glass. And so it went for another couple of hours -- next with a very good California chardonnay and finally with an excellent Napa Valley cabernet. No matter which other glasses you smelled and tasted the wines in, they always showed better in the Riedel glass designed for the specific grape variety.
"My grandfather was the first person on the planet to figure this out -- that the wine inside the glass determines how big the glass is, how it is shaped and the diameter of the rim," Riedel says.
At the end of the night, I asked Riedel if I could borrow the glasses on the table so I could try the experiment at home, beyond the influence of his charming German accent and the stylish atmosphere of the wine bar. He agreed, and after several additional test drives I was sold: The glass really does make a difference.
Just as impressive as the glasses themselves is the story of how they are made.
Since his grandfather Claus Riedel created the first varietally specific stemware in the 1950s, the company has worked closely with the wine industry on the design of each glass. Riedel's flagship line of crystal stemware, called the Sommelier series, was introduced in 1973 after Claus Riedel consulted a group of sommeliers in Italy. What started out with about 10 different glasses has grown to more than 20, as new wine varieties and styles have emerged.
Today, the Sommelier series includes not only a Bordeaux glass, but also a separate glass for mature Bordeaux. There is a glass for Chablis and another for Hermitage, the famous syrah based wine from France's Rhone Valley. There are glasses for rose, the high-acid white wines of Alsace and not one but two types of Champagne -- vintage and nonvintage.
One of the latest launches is a glass designed specifically for Oregon pinot noir, as opposed, say, to French or California pinot noir. The genesis of that glass helps illustrate the genius of Riedel's method.
As usual, the idea for the glass came from the vintners themselves. "It was not me who said that Oregon needs a glass," Riedel tells me. "It was the Oregon winegrowers."
To start with, Maximilian Riedel and his father, Georg Riedel, surveyed the 300 shapes in the company's library and chose a half-dozen they thought might work for Oregon pinot noir. Then they presented those shapes to about 60 Oregon winemakers and asked them to pick their favorites. From there, they narrowed the field to three. They then went back to Riedel's headquarters in Austria and asked a team of craftsmen to blend the best elements of the three to create three new prototypes. Once again, they presented these to the Oregon winemakers and asked them to vote. The results determined the final size and shape of the glass.
I asked Riedel what he would recommend for a wine drinker on a budget. "Is there one Riedel glass that would work well with most types of wine?"
"No, I can't say that," he said. "What I would say is, 'What is your favorite type of wine? If you like cabernet, then get a cabernet glass, or pinot noir, or whatever.' And for most people, it's not necessary to buy sets of eight glasses. Start with just four or six."
Maximilian Riedel has lived in the United States since 2001, when his father dispatched him to take over the company's North American business. One of the first things he did was move the operations from Long Island to Raritan Center in Edison, which was much closer to the shipping terminals.
Another motivation: Maximilian Riedel discovered Hoboken through some friends, and decided he'd rather live there than on Long Island. Last year, he moved from Hoboken to Manhattan, but still commutes every day to Edison.
Aside from being a consummate salesman, Maximilian Riedel is a gifted designer. He personally created Riedel's "O" series of stemless wine glasses, which have turned out to be one of the company's biggest sellers. His most recent concoction is a stunning decanter shaped like a coiled snake. As always with Riedel, form follows function: The shape was chosen because it results in maximum aeration as the wine swirls from "head" to "tail" and back again.