A delicate case of glass warfare

Virtually everyone who knows me knows that I am, shall we say, aesthetically challenged -- largely indifferent (or oblivious) to matters of design and decor, whether at home, in a restaurant or most anywhere else. But I love a beautiful wineglass.

In fact, I own -- at last count -- 116 beautiful wineglasses. I have good Champagne flutes, good everyday white wineglasses and good everyday red wineglasses; I have very good Sauternes glasses, very good Barolo glasses (which I also use for Cabernet-based wines) and two sets of very good Pinot/Burgundy glasses.

The main reason I have all these glasses is that good wine tastes better in good wineglasses -- glasses with thin lips and properly shaped bowls. I know this from personal experience as well as from attending formal, blind-tasting seminars. It has been repeatedly demonstrated to me at these seminars not only that wine in, say, a glass from Riedel tastes better than wine in a clunky water tumbler but that Pinot Noir tastes better in a fine glass designed for Pinot Noir than it does in an equally fine glass designed for Cabernet.

But I also have these glasses because they’re beautiful. I love the gentle curve of the bowl, the thin, elegant stem, the exquisite proportion between stem and bowl, the angular line of my favorite Barolo glass and the sharp, reverse-hourglass shape of my best Burgundy glass.

With the exception of four everyday wineglasses, I keep all my stemware in cardboard boxes, each glass individually bubble-wrapped for protection against dust and accidental breakage. I take great pleasure in unwrapping them and seeing them on the dinner table.

So I notice wineglasses in restaurants. I get upset when a restaurant with a good wine list has crummy wineglasses. I’ve even been known to bring my own glasses to such establishments.

The challenger

There are several manufacturers of fine wineglasses, though, and one thing I began noticing several years ago was that Riedel -- which then made most of the best glasses used in most of the best restaurants -- was being supplanted by a newcomer: Spiegelau.

When I asked around, I found out that while most folks didn’t think Spiegelau glasses were quite as attractive as Riedel’s, there were two reasons for Spiegelau’s inroads:

Their glasses are much cheaper.

Their glasses don’t break as easily as Riedel’s.

“It’s like the difference between Ferrari and Mercedes,” says Wolfgang Puck of Spago. “Ferrari may be the better car, but the Ferrari breaks a lot easier. I’ll take the Mercedes.”

There may be another reason for the emergence of the German-made Spiegelau glasses as a challenger to Austrian-made Riedel. Riedel’s long-standing dominance of high-end stemware may have made the company indifferent to complaints.

“I started with Riedel 20 years ago ... at the original Spago,” Puck says. “They gave me a good deal back then, but after they became so successful, they became a little too self-important, and it became impossible to make a good deal with them or get good service.”

A couple of years ago, Spago took advantage of one of Riedel’s services for good restaurant clients -- the loan of large quantities of glasses, at no charge, for special tastings. But I heard reports that for one particular tasting, 125 of the loaner glasses arrived broken, having been packed in racks too short for their stems. Riedel denies it. I heard that Riedel refused to sell Spago any more glasses until the restaurant paid for the broken glasses. Riedel denies that too.

But one thing is clear: Spago, which had already added some Spiegelau glasses to its inventory, started to phase out Riedel glasses shortly after this incident and now mostly uses Spiegelau.

Spago is far from alone in this move. Mike Green, general manager of Pacific Dining Car, says he ordered 30 dozen Riedel Tempranillo glasses at $11.35 each and 15 dozen Riedel Chardonnay glasses at $8.60 each for his two restaurants, and, “It wasn’t long before we’d broken just about all of them.”

Green says he bought more, and those broke too, “so we switched to Spiegelau, at $5.67 a stem, and after almost three years, we still have more than 60% of them intact. And they’re really nice, good-looking, high-quality glasses.”

That they are. Most of my glasses are Riedel, but my everyday red wineglass is a Spiegelau Zinfandel glass that I find more elegant and more durable (and cheaper) than its Riedel equivalent.

To restaurants’ rescue

Why do Riedel glasses break more easily than Spiegelau glasses? The answer, it seems, is that the joint between stem and bowl just isn’t as strong in most Riedel glasses as it is in most Spiegelau glasses. That’s what I heard from several other restaurateurs. Riedel executives heard the stories too, of course, and in mid-2001 -- in an effort to regain their footing in what I’d come to think of as “wineglass warfare” -- they introduced a new line of glassware, exclusively for restaurants. The new glasses -- in seven styles, to accommodate various wine varietals -- have slightly wider bases, slightly shorter, thicker stems and a more solid, reinforced joining of stem to bowl.

The restaurant glasses, which are not available for retail purchase, are sturdier than other Riedel glasses. They’re also a little less elegant -- and much cheaper. They generally sell for less than $5 each. Maximilian Riedel, executive vice president of the company, says it’s now Riedel’s second-fastest-growing line. His father, Georg Riedel, president of the company, says the restaurant line accounted for about 1.5 million of the 8 million glasses that Riedel sold last year.

Spiegelau doesn’t seem terribly worried, though. Why not? Well, one reason -- which few people in the wine or restaurant world seem to know -- is that Nachtmann Inc., parent company of Spiegelau, is also the parent company of the firm that makes the Riedel restaurant line. So Nachtmann wins no matter which glasses the restaurants buy.

Riedel has long been the big name in fine wine glasses. The company was founded in 1756 and is now -- in the person of 26-year-old Maximilian Riedel -- in its 11th generation of providing beautiful stemware to discerning consumers and collectors.

But what many also don’t realize is that while Riedel produces eight lines of wine glasses -- about 100 different glasses in all -- Riedel factories in Austria produce only the high-end, handblown Sommelier line (which generally sell for $59 to $89 each -- all well beyond my budget). Georg Riedel says the company outsources about 80% to 90% of its annual production to other companies, which use Riedel designs and standards to produce the machine-made glasses that bear the Riedel name.

The latest line of machine-made glasses, introduced this year, is the brainchild of Maximilian Riedel. It’s called “O” and it consists of glasses without stems -- the same bowls as Riedel’s Vinum line but stemless, with flat bottoms. In other words: high-class tumblers.

“Some people don’t use their good Riedel glasses every day for fear of breaking them,” Maximilian Riedel says. “They don’t want to risk putting them in the dishwasher or have to wash them by hand, so I wanted something that would fit easily in the dishwasher and could be stacked in a closet and used on a picnic or a boat or put in your backpack when you go hiking.”

Yeah, right. I can just see myself preparing for my next hike in the High Sierra by stuffing a couple of those fragile “O” Burgundy glasses in my backpack -- right next to the magnum of ’45 La Tache and the Bourgeat copper skillet in which we’ll saute the deer we’ll shoot.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about wine knows that you’re supposed to hold a wine glass by the stem or the base, not the bowl, because warmth from your hand will warm the bowl and the wine inside, adversely affecting its taste. Riedel even makes a point of this in its promotional literature.

So now Riedel makes a glass with no stem and no base, a glass whose bowl you have to hold?

“No one really holds a wine glass most of the time,” Maximilian Riedel says. “They put it on the table. And if they do hold it, they hold it by the bowl, no matter what we tell them.”

Really? I wonder if these bowl-clutching types also gargle their wine.

Georg Riedel seems proud of his son’s contribution to the family line, but between chuckles, in a telephone interview from Austria, he told me that the only way to drink from his son’s stemless glass is to “drink a little faster” so the wine won’t have time to get warm in your hand.

Will he be using the stemless glasses? “My wife asked me that,” he says. “I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I use only Sommelier.”

But the patriarch also pointed out, “We have a maid who comes every day and washes glasses, probably 2,000 glasses a year. People who have to wash their own glasses might feel differently if they can just put this tumbler in the dishwasher.”

Maybe. But I wash and dry by hand and then wrap and put away all the wine glasses in our house. It’s not uncommon for me to do 30 or 40 of them in the pre-dawn hours after a long, multi-course dinner party -- the penalty I pay, my wife, Lucy, says, for insisting on high-quality glasses, a different one for every wine with every course.

Still, I would no more use glasses without stems -- Riedel or not -- than I would serve Two-Buck Chuck with Lucy’s sauteed duck breast.

I am worried, though. With its “O” line, Riedel has fired the most recent round in the war of the glasses. I just hope Spiegelau doesn’t counter with something equally silly -- say a line of glasses with lead crystal straws built into the bowl.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.