jordan 9 The Evolution of Wine Glassware

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The notion pioneered by the Riedel company dominated the wine glassware scene until other companies—Schott [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Bormioli, Spiegelau and others—offered similar lines of glassware, varying only slightly from the Riedel designs and offered at lower prices. Most modern glassware firms offer two or more lines: Riedel offers the popular no-nonsense “Vinum” line in addition to its top-of-the-line “Sommeli
Before snobbery infected the relationship between wine and food, wine was considered food. Then it became art and you needed to follow certain protocols to receive maximum enjoyment from it. The protocols quite naturally included choosing the right glass. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Read on
Learn About Wine: A Wine Tasting Guide for Beginners
Wine Glassware and How to Choose It
Guide to Drinking Glasses: Choosing Glassware for Entertaining
The Contribution of the Riedel Company
Even as late as the 1990s improperly sized and shaped wine glassware appeared on the shelves of the most upscale stores. Many were very attractive, but flawed in ways that had deleterious effects on the full enjoyment of wine. But a white knight was soon to rescue us from wine misery. The movement to perfect the wineglass had already begun in Europe. Claus Riedel began promoting his company’s uniquely-designed stemware as early as 1961 [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], just 10 years after Baccarat’s failed design. Riedel not only attempted to perfect the shape of a general-purpose wineglass; he was the first producer to suggest that many slightly different shapes and sizes were needed to complement the wide spectrum of wine varieties. You needed a different volume and shape for Chardonnay than for Riesling. (The Chardonnay glass is larger and wider.) Champagne needed a special shape to highlight its unique bubbly texture. (This notion turns out to be wrong in the opinion of many Champagne producers.)
In the beginning was the glass. Any glass. No distinction was needed between water glasses and wine glasses. Then came the stem. That signaled the beginning of a long evolution of design that continues to the present. The notion of the stem arose from the fact that wine is often prettier than water and using a glass that displays the wine in a bowl separated from nasty smudges and fingerprints was the first step toward thinking of wine as art.
Wine as Art
The first giant leap forward in the evolution of the wine glass after the universal adoption of the stem was the refinement of the bowl shape in 1951 by the French firm Baccarat. This very thin and elegant wineglass introduced the tulip-shaped bowl which would dominate virtually all wine stemware to the present. Beautiful as these “Perfection” glasses were, they had two faults that would not be significantly improved on for decades: the bowl held only 8 ounces and the sides of the bowl were straight [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], disallowing the vigorous swirling that is necessary to permit the wine to sing.
The Beginning of Wine Glass Shapes
The patriarchs of the modern wine industry—Maynard Amerine, A. J. Winkler, and others who propelled the enology department of the University of California at Davis to become the cutting edge, the avante-garde of wine knowledge—probably never knew how good their wines were. How could they? They didn’t have the correct stemware. And even more reprehensible, pictures from the 1930s show that the glasses they used were much too small and were filled much too full to permit the aeration that releases the wine’s aroma. They just didn’t know any better. They lacked the wise advice of a Georg Riedel to guide them to the proper volume and shape ideally suited to each variety of wine.