Wine: Can the glass make a difference?

(WP) - Maximilian Riedel needed only a few minutes to shatter my views about wineglasses.
Riedel (pronounced REE-dle) is the 11th generation of his family in the glassware business. His grandfather, Claus, revolutionized wine stemware in the 1950s by developing different glass designs for different types of wine. Today the name Riedel is synonymous with fine crystal.

In essence, Claus Riedel’s concept was that the glass can improve the wine, or at least our experience of it. It appealed to wine collectors, who could now collect various types of glassware: a particular stem for chardonnay, another for sauvignon blanc, yet another for Riesling, not to mention those for cabernet sauvignon, syrah and sangiovese. More-neurotic wine lovers were gripped with the fear that drinking from the wrong glass would diminish their vino-cred.

Personally, I prefer simplicity: one set of glasses for white wines, a larger version for reds. How expensive depends on what you drink. For plonk, a water glass is fine. First-growth Bordeaux or a cult Napa cabernet, however, deserves a fine stem that can emphasize the wine’s subtleties — the very qualities we are paying for in a wine of that caliber. Riedel expressed a similar sentiment.

“I won’t ask you to buy a $100 glass to drink a $10 wine,” he said. Riedel’s company produces several lines of stemware, ranging from $12 to $125 per glass. We spoke via Skype last month as he took a break from the holiday party at his company headquarters in Kufstein, Austria. We tasted three wines using the Riedel Vinum XL line of glasses, which retails for about $35 a stem. The wines and glasses were provided by Riedel’s publicist.
We tasted a Deutz rosé champagne ($60) and a Louis Jadot Pommard 2009 Burgundy ($50), both of which excelled in the pinot noir glass (though the Pommard didn’t need a special glass so much as 10 more years in a cellar).