Wine: It’s all in the glass

I’m sitting at a white-tablecloth restaurant across from aman whose actual name is Maximilian. And he has just told me he is about to ruin my life.

Maximilian’s last name is Riedel. As in the wine glasses. As in, he’s the 11th generation of his family to head the vaunted crystal company, which has become famous for creating varietal-specific glasses: chardonnay glasses for your chardonnay; pinot noir glasses for your pinot noir.

Me? I’m the woman who tastes her Tempranillo out of sip-and-stroll giveaway glasses.

“To break it down to the bare minimum, it’s comparable to a pair of shoes,” he says in his lilting Austrian accent. “Every one of us has a closet full of shoes. You have a shoe for a certain mission. For track and field, you use a different pair of shoes than going to a gala dinner, than going to work. All of this. A shoe has a purpose. And a wine glass has a purpose.”

I listen intently, crossing my feet at the ankles and tucking them self-consciously beneath my chair. I am wearing black Toms. The same ones I wear to work, Astros games and on long walks with my dog. Perhaps I am not the right market for this.

In a few minutes, I’m joining about 100 restaurant-industry folks for a wine tasting, in which Riedel will serve us chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon, first in the wrong glasses, then in the glasses his company created for each varietal. And Riedel makes me a promise:

“Your eyes will pop. Your ears will blow. Your senses will be sharpened,” he vows. “And you will say, ‘Damn it, if I had known this sooner, I would not have wasted so much time and money on good wine I’ve misunderstood.’ ”

I have my suspicions. But I stand up, thank him for his time, pray he isn’t glancing at my shoes and walk over to the auditorium for his presentation.

I find a seat in the second row. My place is set with the three aforementioned wines and five glasses: one each for riesling, chardonnay, pinot noir, syrah and cabernet. After a few minutes, Riedel appears at the front of the room and launches into an introduction not too dissimilar from the primer he’d given me personally. He talks about wine glasses and shoes. Befores and afters. And because he’s trying to sell something to a class of people who are in turn trying to sell something to others, he makes a pitch: Restaurants that serve wine in the proper glass sell more wine. He has the crowd’s attention.

He instructs us to pour the chardonnay into the first three glasses. Then he tells us to pick up the second glass, which was created specifically for this kind of wine.

“Start to swirl. Let the molecules fly,” he says. “Let the wine come close to the rim, and dive into the aromas. Cover the glass with your face.”

We sniff the wine — inhaling, then exhaling, then inhaling again — and he tells us to close our eyes so we can home in on our sense of smell.

“It’s endless, the experience, when you put your nose into the glass,” Riedel says. “There’s depth, there’s structure, there’s fruit, there’s plurality. There’s so much that you can gain, not only because of the quality of the wine but the combination of the quality and the size of the glass.”

He’s right. I smell fruit, spice, a whole bouquet of inviting flavors. I’m not much of a chardonnay lover, but I’m excited about drinking this particular sample.

Not so fast, he says. It’s time to set that glass down and try nosing the chardonnay from the riesling glass.

“Put your nose in there, and the wine changes,” he says.

My baloney-meter goes off, but I follow his instructions. And I’m surprised when I take my first inhalation and instantly feel as though I’m smelling … less. This wine, which I poured myself and know is the same as the wine in the first glass, smells smaller. Like it’s missing something.

“You’re missing most of the parfum,” he says. “It is charming and complex in the chardonnay glass, and here it’s monotone. You have a little bit of fruit, lots of structure. You have much more minerality. And much more acidity when putting in your glass, and sadly, you also have more alcohol.”

That’s by design, really. Chardonnays have a higher alcohol content than riesling, so the chardonnay glass is wider, allowing for a greater surface volume so the alcohol doesn’t overwhelm the senses like it might in a narrower glass, such as the ones designed for riesling.

We try the third glass, and I feel the same disappointment.

Surely this is witchcraft. And it will be rectified when we begin sipping. But it isn’t.

As we take our first sip from the chardonnay glass, Riedel instructs us to pay attention to an overwhelming number of things: head position; wine flow; where the wine meets my tongue; texture; structure; length of aftertaste. My head would spin if it wasn’t glued to a wine glass.

He begins walking through this with us, helping us find the answers.

“When you drink from this glass, how far is your head moving back?” he asks again. “Very little to none at all, due to the shape of the bowl. And in this case, the wine naturally flows, thanks to gravity. And the first contact of the wine with your palate is not at the tip of your tongue. It’s on the center. Why?”

He answers his own question: Based on the wine’s acidity level and fruit content, this is the optimal part of the tongue for it to hit first, before rolling over the rest of the palate. I’m not sure I follow the science here, but I taste what he means. And somewhere between my tongue and my brain, it clicks with me.

We take another sip before moving on to the next glass for a sip.

“Does it feel the same?” he asks.

The man next to me groans. “No,” he says, before splashing the rest ofthat glass’s contents into the chardonnay vessel so he can drink it from there. There are similar grunts elsewhere in the room. And I agree. It tastes similar to how it smelled in this glass: heavy in alcohol, without all those lovely floral notes from the chardonnay glass.

“There is fire on my palate!” Riedel booms at the front of the room. “There’s minerality all over the place. The wine becomes, all of a sudden, acidic. And this beautiful structure, texture, it’s not silky and creamy any more. It’s like biting into a rock.”

This is the way I’ve always thought chardonnay tasted. And I consider for a moment that maybe Riedel had been correct when he told me he’d ruin my life today.

We repeat this experiment thrice, and each time I feel like I’ve glimpsed new, boozy horizons. I walked into this hotel ballroom as an Act 1Eliza Doolittle, but after two hours here, I feel as though I’m leaving a changed woman.

I get home, hopped up on the jovial force that comes from being on the inside of a secret. I bounce and smile as I relay the tasting to my fiancé, John, insisting that we clear out the clutter in our cabinet and make way for varietal-specific glasses. He eyes me skeptically. And when he asks how much the glasses cost, I skirt the issue by suggesting we add them to our wedding registry.

He asks again. “How much do they cost, Maggie?”

I sigh because the cost starts at about $25 per glass, and the ones I liked best — the Performance line — are even more, which is decidedly out of our price range for something I’ll probably wash wrong and ruin anyway.

“It doesn’t sound like it’s worth it to me,” he says.

I knew that was coming. So I just give him a sly smile and make a promise: “I’ll prove it to you.” maggie.gordon@chron.com twitter.com/MagEGordon