Red, White, and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean

Author:Natalie MacLean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

A Glass Act

HE‘S HANDSOME, TANNED, and trim, with courtly manners and a soft Austrian accent. His eyes, the azure of Alpine skies, gaze into mine over the restaurant table and several glasses of wine. I know that he will change my life forever, bring me years of domestic bliss. We barely touch our food since we’re both quivering with anticipation. But, alas, he’s no Captain von Trapp, I’m not Maria, and this isn’t really a romantic dinner. It’s a gathering of wine enthusiasts in Ottawa, Ontario, to meet Georg Riedel, who represents the tenth generation of his family to make crystal stemware.

The Tyrolean mountains of Austria may be alive with the sound of music, but the Riedel Glass factory in Kufstein is abuzz with the noise of production. The company now makes some 5 million lead-crystal wineglasses every year. Riedel is in town to convince any skeptics that the shape and size of a glass profoundly affect the smell and taste of the wine it holds.

“Now this,” Riedel says, picking up a puny glass, “is the enemy of wine.” His disdain is so palpable that we all glare at the vessel like a village outcast. It looks like something from the sorry little collection of chipped and unmatched specimens I had as a student years ago. Riedel calls such an object a “joker": it’s here tonight for contrast.

In front of us are four gleaming Riedel glasses, all containing a little of their namesake wines: sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir, and cabernet sauvignon. Both the chardonnay and pinot noir glasses have more rounded bowls than the sauvignon blanc and bordeaux glasses, which are more tulip shaped. These tall glasses, with their elegant lines, look like lithe supermodels beside the joker glass, which sits empty like a parched troll.

I’m dreading a stemware slipup such as confusing the chardonnay and cabernet glasses, then being branded a Dixie Cup Chick. Perhaps my feelings come partly from Herr Riedel himself: one senses he has patrician sensibilities that it would be easy to offend. He’s famously fastidious; he has even planned the wines to be served at his own funeral. At fifty-four, he looks just like the debonair actor you’d imagine in an ad for Riedel stemware. He wears a crisp navy suit (made from Italian fabric by a Viennese tailor) and has the svelte figure of a marathon runner.

He asks us to first taste some chardonnay from the joker glass and then again from the proper wineglass—which he calls his “precision tool.” He talks animatedly about the “velocity of wine entering the mouth,” and how it makes love to the palate, caressing it. He gazes shyly at his own precision tool as we taste. I want to throw the glass over my shoulder and declare, “Let’s just get away from here!” But I’m distracted by the genuine difference in the smell and taste. The wine we drink from the small glass is as predictably bad as the “other brand” in a Tide commercial: it tastes sharp and alcoholic.

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