Last month the Chicagoist food and drink staff gathered at Binny's South Loop for a Riedel stemware seminar led by the current head of the company himself, Georg Riedel. For the better part of two hours, the exuberant Austrian alternately enraptured and berated his attentive audience, preaching the gospel that his Vitis stemware line (vitis being the Latin word for "vine") would make drinking any wine a religious experience. At one point we half-expected Riedel to proclaim, "If Jesus had this stemware at za vedding vere he turned vater into vine, it vould make za vine better!"
This wasn't our first Riedel rodeo but for those whom it was they were overjoyed at the end to walk away from the seminar with what amounted to a $150 set of mismatched stemware that would shatter back into sand if you looked at the glasses the wrong way.
One of the constants of a Riedel seminar is to transfer the wines served from one glass to the next. This brings out different characteristics of the grape based on the long-outdated "tounge map." Riedel doesn't exactly say that. What he and his salespeople tell customers is that the glasses are "fine-tuned" to bring out the best characteristics of the wine for which the wine is intended.
It's all about suggestion.
We'd be lying if we said we didn't notice differences in the way the wines poured at the event lay on the palates after following Riedel's instructions ("Do not drink YET! Swirl."). But one could do the same thing with another line of crystal stemware, some Anchor Hocking or Libbey stemware bought at Crate & Barrel, or even jelly jars of varying size. Studies have never conclusively proven Riedel's claim, but it's never stopped tastemakers and oenophiles like Robert Parker from waxing hyperbole about Riedel stemware.
We'll grant that Riedel stemware is absolutely gorgeous. Outside of trying to impress someone over dinner, we probably won't use them all the time.
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"This wasn't our first Riedel rodeo but for those whom it was they were overjoyed at the end to walk away from the seminar with what amounted to a $150 set of mismatched stemware that would shatter back into sand if you looked at the glasses the wrong way."
Did you write this drunk? :)
For a contrasting view, Mike Steinberger wrote a very good article in Slate a few years back.
I, for one, always have a religious experience when I gulp my Old Style from fancy stemware!
I cannot be trusted with expensive stemware.
I go through wine glasses like water...I am constantly breaking them when I wash them...either by wacking them against the faucet or using too much pressure with the sponge. So I get cheap stuff now.
I did see some really neat STEMLESS wine glasses at a little wine shop recently.
I am going to treat myself to those as a 'housewarming' gift when I move.
If my house ever sells :/
Stemless are great and because they aren't "attached" at the bottom, but only have reinforced glass, the bowl of the glass (the whole glass) seems stronger.
Riedel makes some pretty good stemless stemware. It's nowhere on the level of the Vitis, but still pretty fragile. When drinking wine, my normal fallback glass is an Anchor Hocking Pinot noir glass I picked up at a Dollar Tree.
We have a number of different Riedels of the Vinum variant and some of the O's, and while they are beautiful, they just break too easily.
I think next time I buy a set I will go with the lower class Riedels that are sold at Target. There may be a difference, but after a couple of glasses my palate turns to shit anyway as I get drunker and drunker.
i always wondered, though.. with the stemless, does the heat from your hand transfer to the wine and affect the taste?
Aren't you supposed to cup the bowl with your hand anyway (stem through the live long and prosper gap between middle and ring finger)?
I may have made that up many years ago. It does help steady the Riedel sommelier glasses with their giant bowls.
I don't pull them out very often. They make drinking the wine an experiment in if-I-was-a-midget. I have A/B'd them with regular glasses and there was a definite difference. I'd still say that they are primarily for impressing guests or dates, though. As I rarely have either, they stay in the closet. :-)
Yeah, I don't like the stemless, but I thought they were ok for red wines.
The great thing about the stemless glasses is the low center of gravity; you're reducing the chance of spillage or tipping over.
'Course, the Riedels cost a mint. I've found some Libbeys for around a third of the cost that work pretty well.
Stemless are fine for red wine, which you drink at room temperature and want to swirl anyway.
Stemless are horrible for whites (and champagne and martinis; my part time job sells stemless for all those) because you are supposed to hold a white wine glass BY the stem so you DON'T heat up the wine at all if possible.
my two cents.
I should have prefaced my comment that I was referring to red wine. I've never used a stemless white glass and the bowl wouldn't be large enough to hold in that fashion anyway.
and why are you referencing slate, anyway, YTB (could you just change your screen name to a shorter Faulkner reference?). This is the same online magazine that told us four dollars a gallon for gas is cheap. They're all contrarians.