Riedel, a Glass of Wine
Drinking wine can be enjoyed by everybody. Some people just like to drink a glass of wine and have the feeling that it adds just that special thing to the moment. Others focus on the wine itself and get a great experience from analyzing the wine they are drinking.
People have drunk wine for almost 9000 years. While developing agriculture and building up civilization, wine has been a part of our lives. The Ancient Greeks and Romans even dedicated a god to wine.
We don’t know exactly from which vessels wine was consumed in the old days but it has not always been a glass cup. Nowadays wine is hardly drunk from anything else than a wine glass. As many of us simply know, the wine drinking experience is lost when drinking wine out of something else than a real wine glass. Connoisseur or not, the glass you are drinking your wine from can be of great influence to your drinking experience.
That knowledge what we all carry around has, however, only recently become common knowledge. Not many people know that the typical wine glass was only invented in the late fifties of the last century. Until that time wine glasses were made out of heavy glass, cut and often coloured glass and they seemed to be designed to enhance the beauty of the table setting rather than that they did good to the wine.
Prof. Claus Riedel was the first person to recognize the relationship between the shape of a glass and the experience of the taste of wine. He started experimenting in 1957 and focused on aspects of wine like bouquet, taste, balance and finish. His experiments resulted in a wine glass with the following characteristics: A thin blown bowl and a long thin stem.
Riedel came from a glass makers family with a long history. That history started in the end of the 17th century when Johann Christoph Riedel started as a glassware merchant. After a while the Riedel family started producing glassware and after many generations their glass company was, in the first half of the last century, world wide known as a an excellent Bohemian glassware producer of perfume flacons, colored overlayed glass giftware, chandeliers and chandelier parts.
After WWII the Riedel family moved over to Austria and restarted the glass business as Riedel Glas Austria. The work of Claus Riedel was recognized by all the wine lovers and wine professionals. Ongoing research led to the introduction of the Sommeliers collection, in 1973. Claus Riedel had made a series of lead crystal glasses in which the form of each glass was fine tuned to a specific grape. The Sommeliers glasses were worldwide recognized as the ultimate wine experience. Claus Riedel had changed the wine glass forever.
Riedel Glas Austria is the “wine glass company” and has many collections of fine wine glasses. The mouthblown Sommeliers and Sommerliers Black Tie are the flag ships of the company. The Vinum series were the first machine made, grape specific, wine glasses. This technology is also used for the series Wine, Vitis and Grape where each of these series emphasizes other aspects of wine drinking experience.
Besides these professional glasses for supreme wine drinking experience, Riedel Glas Austria has not forgotten that people at home also want to enjoy wine. Not everybody has the space (or the money) to buy wine glasses for each and every grape. For casual but elegant home dining there are the two series Tyrol and Ouverture. Riedel Glas Austria made wine glasses for these two series for which the form is based on the characteristics of the most popular grapes.
A “glass of wine” sounds so natural and everybody imagines this as the thin blown high stemmed wine glass. After 7000 years of glass making and 9000 years of wine making it was Claus Riedel who combined these two technologies and created that special experience that wine drinkers all over the world enjoy. willamette wine tours