I like wine critic and consultant Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible and find her recommendations to be reliable. Even so, it was with some skepticism that I learned she had partnered with housewares company Oneida to produce flavor-specific wine glasses. The idea behind the new glasses seems to have been to do the Riedel thing but through a radically simplified concept.
The Riedel company claims it is able to “create shapes in which the wine, vinified from specific grape varieties,” improves. Maybe, but the company has taken this to implausible lengths, making, for example, different glasses for unoaked chardonnay and oaked chardonnay and different glasses for old-world pinot noir versus new-world pinot noir.
Riedel glasses come in such a dizzying profusion of shapes and sizes that those of us who are jaded about such things sense a vague whiff of hucksterism rather than the delicate and distinctive bouquet of wines made from specific grapes. But that’s just me. Before the Riedel family members get on the hotline to their lawyers — they’ve proved to be litigious in the past — let me stipulate that I’m quite sure their business is a thoroughly sincere enterprise. I’m confident that in a blind tasting (that is, one in which a mystery wine was poured into a dozen different glasses, one of which was the specific glass designed for the wine in question), they would be able to identify the correct glass. Oh yes, and I’m sure they would be able to do so repeatedly with different mystery wines in different glasses.
I couldn’t do it, but I’m quite sure that’s just a sad commentary on the limits of my palate.
The new glasses designed by MacNeil, by contrast, come in just three shapes and one size. The pairing of wine and wineglass is done not by the type of grape or hemisphere in which the juice originated but by the most general descriptions of the wine’s flavor. One glass is at its widest toward the bottom of the bowl. It is meant for “Bold & Powerful” wines. Another glass, designated “Creamy & Silky,” is widest at its waist. Rounding out the collection is a glass at its widest about a third of the way down from the rim: This is meant to accentuate “Fresh & Crisp” wines.
So, do the glasses make a difference, and is that difference as advertised? The only fair way to find out was to do a blind tasting.
I bought a half-dozen bottles of wine, each of which was a typical type, and gathered a few wine-savvy friends. For the whites, there was a dry German riesling, a bright Italian pinot grigio, and a French chardonnay. For the reds, there was an Italian Chianti, a French pinot noir, and an American cabernet sauvignon. We went one bottle at a time, with the tasters trying each of the wines in each of the glasses.
We found there were indeed differences, though not necessarily the ones we would have expected. For example, the tasters were unimpressed with how the wines fared in the most generic of the glasses, the one with the widest point at the middle of the bowl. The one exception was the wine-wisest of our little group who liked that glass for chardonnay. He preferred the big-bottomed bowl for the pinot grigio, the Chianti, and the pinot noir, and he chose the top-heavy glass for the riesling.
The rest of us did perceive the wines differently based on the glass, but not in the way we were supposed to. We preferred the glass with the “elevated midpoint” regardless of the wine. One isn’t looking for a pinot noir to be “Fresh & Crisp,” but for me, that was the glass best for that wine, and for the other wines, too.
That suggests you should look for wine glasses that are best, not for the wine, but for you.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
