Can a wine glass possibly be worth $10 or even $20? After all, that’s more than a lot of pretty decent wines cost, and the good glasses are thin and thoroughly breakable. 

Hard it is to believe, the answer, at least for those of us who are really interested in wine, is a resounding yes. Those fancy, fragile orbs really do make a difference.

Spiegelau and Mikasa make some fine glasses, but the king of the roost remains Riedel. A Monday-afternnon session with  the company’s meticulous poobah, Georg Riedel, demonstrated why.

In town to showcase the company’s new “Flow” series, Riedel proved a most proper pitchman despite (or because of?) a hearty dose of Hessian hauteur. “This wine seems to have been made by a peasant,” he sniffed at one point. But he also displayed a wry side as a cell phine dinged incessantly: “Nice … sound.”

Anyway, the glasses were cool, with very thick stems and the signature Riedel bowls. (Some of the “Flow” glasses are available at the Eagan Byerly’s.) And the differences in aromas and flavors when we switched varietals from one glass to another were extraordinary. We were sampling four fine wines, all of which showed fewer, and lesser, aromas and decidedly inferior flavors in the “wrong” vessel. “It’s not the wine’s fault” that it tasted “off” in the wrong glass, Riedel pointedly noted.

None of this was a revelation to most of those in attendance (it was a trade event). But there was some oohing and aahing when Riedel directed us to sniff a glass a full five minutes after we had emptied it out. ALL of the original aromas were there; it was as if the glass were still full.

“You are not under hypnosis,” Riedel intoned from the podium.

And since aromas are the foremost component of wine flavors — some experts estimate the effect as high as 90 percent — that “hypnotic” demonstration was impressive.

Bottom line: We’ll continue to buy Riedels — and continue to be seriously bummed on those not-infrequent occasions when we break one.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.