The Beauty of Waterford Is Crystal Clear

Hey, I’m an outdoors, hunting-and-fishing kind of guy, really, who’s happy sitting on the ground by a fire, drinking out of a bottle and eating with my hands off a tin plate. But I like crystal, china and silver in an antique dining room just a little bit better.

I drove my fiancee, now my wife, crazy when I had to tag along for wedding pattern shopping.

Ours was to be a traditional Greek wedding, and we wanted our table setting to reflect our anticipated lifestyle.

As much as we were attracted to translucent china and the graceful elegance of Baccarat, which we thought would be best-suited for intimate gatherings and nouvelle cuisine, we knew our style would be a crowded table with platter-busting turkeys, hams and legs of lamb. We decided, instead, on more substantial china designs, selecting Wedgwood’s cobalt blue and floral Runnymede.

After a twinge of nostalgia when I recognized my grandmother’s classic Etruscan sterling, we settled on my mother-in-law’s Grande Baroque, reasoning that someday we were likely to come into much more of it. I especially liked the look and heft of the massive silver Baroque tray--a necessary accessory in our Greek wedding ceremony. And the fussiness of the pattern would fit well with a carved Victorian dining room suite.

With china and silver selected, we didn’t linger long selecting Kildare by Waterford to complete our table.

At first glance Kildare resembles the more common Lismore, but you can’t get as wide of variety of crystal pieces in Kildare, which is part of its charm. I prefer antique snifters anyway.

Sure, Baccarat is more elegant and delicate, but it lacks the tactile pleasures of weight and sharp cuts that characterize our Waterford.

This night we used only the champagne flutes and water goblets. The stems for red and white wine were held in reserve on the sideboard, in case a guest preferred a still appellation.

After the table was cleared and the china and silver loaded into the dishwasher, I tended to the pleasurable part of cleanup: polishing off the remnants of the Moet and Grand Marnier as I hand-washed the crystal to the thumping beat of the dishwasher.

I used to run the crystal through the dishwasher until I saw a hard-water fog accumulating in the deep cuts.

But there is one problem to hand washing: One of our goblets has a ragged edge that I seem to catch with my fingertip. The washing chore is like the playful bite one gets when stroking a strange cat.

As the other stems wait their their turn to be washed, I note that one piece lists and that several are slightly taller or shorter. On closer examination, I find the rims are of varying thickness, too. I recall a Wall Street Journal article a few years ago that chided Waterford for quality control problems and the effect it might have on their share price. But now I rationalize these irregularities as verification of being handcrafted.

The final rinse. The stems ring out as my fingers touched their resonant frequencies, all slightly different. I used to fill several goblets with varying amounts of water to create a tone scale and play a song for the kids. Now the stems are reposed inelegantly upside down in the drying rack, waiting for a final polishing, my fingertip throbbing red on wrinkly white.

The author lives in Huntington Beach.