RIEDEL Performance Cabernet / Merlot Glass x 4
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Cabernet and the Bordeaux blends carry firm tannin, high alcohol and a lot of aroma, and they need air before any of it settles. This bowl gives them both: 105mm across at the widest point so the wine spreads and meets air, then drawn back in towards a cut rim so what lifts off it gathers above the surface rather than dispersing into the room.
Fine ridges run inside the bowl — Riedel's optic impact, first used on the Performance range and designed by Georg and Maximilian Riedel. They increase the inner surface area and catch the light as the wine moves. The glass is thin-blown crystal with a cut rim rather than a rolled one, on a long stem with a wide, stable base.
It suits Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and the Bordeaux blends across the Médoc, Pauillac, Margaux, St Julien, St Estèphe, Pessac-Léognan, Pomerol and St Émilion, and the same grapes wherever else they are grown well — Napa, Coonawarra, Stellenbosch, Bolgheri. Also Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Carménère, Malbec, Montepulciano and Brunello di Montalcino.
A set of four. The bowl holds 834ml to the brim and Riedel's serving measure is 125ml, which in a glass this size looks like very little and is the right amount. 245mm tall, 105mm at the widest point. Premium machine-made crystal glass.
Dishwasher safe on a low temperature, with space around each glass so nothing touches. If you wash by hand, use hot water and no detergent, which leaves a film that dulls aroma. Dry with a linen cloth and store upright rather than on the rim.
Riedel have been making glass since 1756, when the family founded a glassworks in Bohemia. They were dispossessed of it after the Second World War and began again in Austria, buying the Kufstein glassworks in 1956; Georg Riedel, the tenth generation, and his son Maximilian, the eleventh, run the company now. Claus Riedel, the ninth, was the first to design a glass around what was going into it rather than around how it could be decorated, stripping the form back to bowl, stem and base. His 1973 Sommeliers collection was the first stemware shaped for particular wines, and every serious glassmaker has followed since. The mouth-blown glasses are still made by hand at Kufstein; the machine-made ranges come from the factory at Weiden in Germany.
