 The Mark Phillips Wine Glass
$19.99 each
Click here to watch a video of the Mark Phillips Wine Glass
Does the shape of a wine glass really make a difference? Yes and no. There's no question that the shape and size of a glass makes a difference...but what kind of difference? Riedel glassware, the 800 pound gorilla in fine wine glasses, has a different wine glass for each type of wine / grape. If you're drinking a red Bordeaux, then Riedel suggests you use a Bordeaux glass. If you're having a Pinot Noir, then use a red Burgundy glass, a Chardonnay, use a Chardonnay glass and so on. It's crazy! I started to wonder if you really needed a different shaped glass for each type of wine so I did some research.
I took a variety of glasses, all different shapes and sizes, ones made from crystal and some made from regular glass and poured the same wine in all of them. I had people taste the same wine from each glass and rate the following:
A) which glass made the wine taste the best
B) which glass felt the better in their hand
The results:
A) The glass that was designed to be used for the grape variety that was poured NEVER received the majority of votes. The red Burgundy glass that was designed for Pinot Noir never was chosen by the majority as the glass that made the Pinot Noir taste better. The glass designed for Chardonnay never got the most votes when a Chardonnay was poured in all of the glasses. In fact, the "proper" glass never got the most votes for any of the wines. Yet Riedel claims each glass is designed specifically for a type of wine. Oops!
What was fascinating is that the people preferred one particular glass....no matter if the wine was white or red.
B) The glass that felt the best to drink from was always a hand-blown crystal glass. Of all the hand-blown glasses in the lineup, the Sommelier series Hermitage / Syrah glass by Riedel was chosen by more people.
Conclusion: People preferred one glass shape for both white and red. no matter what the wine was. Secondly, hand-blown crystal was the favorite, hands down. A glass maker can make a lighter glass out of crystal vs. glass and the thin lip and the "rough" texture of crystal brings out so many more dimensions of the wine than a machine made glass.
People preferred the shape of the Sommelier series Hermitage / Syrah glass by Riedel for both white and red wine. And it was hand-blown crystal so it seemed to be the perfect, all around glass. So I got one...for $90 (from www.williamsonoma.com). That's right. That's not a typo. The glass costs $90 each! The first time I washed it, it broke. I bought another. It broke too. I bought more and they broke. I couldn't use the glass more than a few times before the bowl broke. It was nuts!
So that's when I decided to have my own glass made. I found a group of old-world artisans in Slovakia to produce the glass to my specifications. I designed my glass very similar to the Riedel Hermitage glass and made it hand-blown crystal. But I added a few twists. First, the design of my glass makes it the lightest glass in the world...40% lighter than the Riedel. Light means elegant. The lighter the glass, the more elegant it feels. It's so light and delicate feeling, it scares people when they first hold it. They're worried they'll break it...which is understandable if you have ever had hand-blown wine glasses. Secondly, it's better balanced. The Riedel glass was very top heavy while mine is perfectly balanced. And lastly, even though my glass is so light, it's also durable. It can actually be washed in the dishwasher...a breakthrough for hand-blown crystal. In fact, I recommend you wash them in the dishwasher vs. by hand. My glass has been through thousands of dishwasher cycles without breaking!
The Mark Phillips Wine Glass is hand-blown crystal, elegant, durable and is the perfect size for all wines. The glass comes with MP on the base of the glass so you know you have the real thing. But the best part is that it doesn't cost $90!! The MP wine glass is better than the Riedel yet it's over 75% less expensive!
ATTENTION: I want to remind you that although the glasses are very durable, I do not recommend bending the stem or knocking them over like I did on the video. It's a great party trick but they DO break. Hey, it's crystal. Refunds are not offered for broken glasses once you receive them.
The glasses are only sold in boxes of two. Each box is just $39.98
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From my research, the idea of trying to match the glass to the type of wine is just a bunch of baloney but I was curious to if anyone else had done a study. Daniel Zwerdling, an NPR reporter, wrote an article about Riedel that was published in Gourmet in August 2004. Daniel discovered that a tasting was done by the Monell Chemical Senses Center, one of the world's most prestigious laboratories studying taste and smell. They compared wine poured in Riedel glasses, cheap wine glasses and a water goblet. The subjects were not allowed to see or hold the glasses. The subjects couldn't tell any difference from one glass to another.
Georg Riedel was so bothered by the results, he asked Thomas Hummel, a prominent physician and researcher at the University of Dresden to do a major experiment to prove that Riedel's glasses work the way he claims. This study was much bigger than the one done at the Monell Center but the results were the same...the subjects couldn't tell the difference between the glasses.
Daniel Zwerdling called Georg Riedel for an explanation. Riedel said, "I don't know the studies in detail that I can really comment on them....Ask consumers if my glasses make a difference. And the consumers say, "Wow!""
Most people who have attended a Riedel seminar walk out convinced that the wine glass makes a difference. The scientists explain this as a combination of great salesmanship and power of suggestion. There have been many other studies that have shown the impact of the power of suggestion. In 1998, Frederic Brochet, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux, fooled wine professionals into thinking that a white wine was a red wine simply by adding food coloring to it. They didn't stop there. The second part of the study was sampling two wines. The wine professionals were told the first one was an inexpensive wine. Then a second wine was brought and the professional were told it was very expensive. All the wine professionals preferred the second one. Of course, the first and the second wines were the same. Brochet stated that all of the information that people have, the label, the cost, the producer, etc. plays a huge role in their opinion of the wine. He supposes the same thing is happening with wine glasses. People prefer the Riedel because they cost more, they look good, they are delicate and wine experts and writers say they make a difference. But all the science says they don't.
Just think about it, if Riedel glasses are designed for a specific type of wine, then why does Riedel sell 10 different glasses just for Cabernet Sauvignon? And what's even crazier is what Cabernet? Yellow Tail Cabernet, Silver Oak or Lafite Rothschild? Those are all completely different Cabernets.
The idea of a wine glass designed for a specific type of wine is just plain baloney. It's all a marketing gimmick by Riedel...and they've done a great job of it.
Professional Reviews of the MP Glass
Two reviews have just come out about the glass. First from Jennifer Rosen (www.corkjester.com) who is a very witty and insightful wine writer who wrote a nice article about wine glasses. It's a longer article but the finish is superb!
Glass Menagerie
Inspiration on a stem
"A gleeful skeptic, I love debunking long-held truths as well as brand new, pseudoscientific claims. And they keep on showing up with new twists. The magic word du jour is Quantum Physics, used to explain any crackpot concept too grand and mystical to submit to double-blind studies and other scientific crassness. Quantum Physics is safe to invoke because the theory is so bizarre even the scientists who came up with it don’t understand it.
So I was pleased to read the headline, “Wine glass manufacturer Riedel has filed a lawsuit in against competitor Eisch, challenging its marketing of a new line of glassware as 'breathable'.”
Who needs a glass that pants? you may wonder. Well, you see, young, overly-tannic wines soften up with oxygen, so they’re often decanted about thirty minutes to over an hour before serving. Eisch claims their glasses undergo a process of “oxygenation” that produces the same effect with only two to four minutes in the glass.
Before the highly secret process was acquired by Eisch it was offered to Austrian glass giant Riedel, but they turned it down when demonstrations failed to impress them. A few years ago I chastised Riedel for being unscientific. They were claiming their glasses actually changed the taste of wine, by directing exactly where and how it hit your tongue. The idea was based on the tongue map, that diagram beloved of elementary school science teachers, positing the existence of taste zones, for instance sweet on the tip, sour on the sides and so forth. The tongue map happens to be a mistranslation of a long discredited 19th century German document but it’s the appealing sort of lie that just won’t go away.
To Riedel’s credit, they seem to have moved away from that concept, now emphasizing wine aromas and glass quality instead. Whether this has anything to do with my pin in their balloon I don’t know. Still, I’ve always felt bad because, tongue map aside, I adore their glasses. Not that they do anything to the wine, but for the sheer hedonistic pleasure of something exquisitely-made and balanced, like a perfect fountain pen, or a leather jacket that fits just so.
So I was thrilled to see Riedel standing up for good, solid science. Still, I owed it to Eisch to try their glass before I mocked it. Stranger things have happened. I once tested a magnetized bottle coaster that claimed to take a ragtag group of undisciplined tannin molecules and cause them to line up, salute, and slide down your gullet in formation. And, to my surprise, it did make the wine softer and smoother. But I didn’t like the effect. It tended to turn a complex, interesting wine into something boring and one dimensional.
Eisch had sent me their glass accompanied by an identical, non-breathable version for comparison. So I opened the roughest, toughest young red I could find, poured, waited a couple of minutes, and tasted. I found, to my intense annoyance, a profound difference. In the untreated glass, the wine felt rough and crunchy, as though shards of broken wood were sticking out from the surface. In the oxygenated glass, all was smooth as a baby’s bottom. I tried again, blindfolded, and still the two glasses were so easy to tell apart that even my wine-virgin assistant could do it.
I was being duped, I knew it. But I couldn’t figure out how. Could it be the “neutral” glass doing something bad to the wine? But…what?
I tried again the next day, opening five different reds and adding three similarly-shaped glasses to the line-up. This time, though, there was no difference at all from glass to glass. I tried to pick out the breathable glass, but mostly failed. Could I have washed something away? Not according to Eisch’s claim that the “oxygenation” is both permanent and dishwasher-proof.
I’ve tried a few more times, alone and with help, but never duplicated the first experience. Meanwhile, Eisch keeps sending me press releases about well-known wine experts affirming the virtues of the breathable glass, usually after comparative sensory tests at the ETS Laboratories in Napa. Maybe those tests were a little too controlled, if you know what I mean. But who knows. It certainly won’t be the first time I’ve found myself out of step with great palates.
It’s still a mystery, but at the moment I don’t particularly care, because I’m besotted with something else entirely: the Mark Phillips glass; a perfectly balanced ovoid; gossamer-thin as though knitted out of invisible fibers from a thousand tiny spider webs. When I hand it to people, they flinch, afraid to be trusted with something so delicate. Yet it’s actually far heartier than most glass and crystal, because it’s designed to bend and give like a skyscraper in the wind, and requires a much stronger force to snap it. At around $25, it’s also far less expensive than other crystal in its league. And for the time being, it’s the only glass that leaves me breathless."
Wow, doesn't that just sound wonderful....breathless? If that wasn't enough, here is a report from a top wine rating publication.
Testing the MP Wine Glass
The MP Wine Glass is elegant to look at and feather-light in the hand, but does it really enhance the taste of wine? To answer this question we put it to the test. First, we compared two white wines, pouring about two ounces into both the xx wine glass and a standard tasting glass. The first white wine tasted was the 2007 Southern Right Sauvignon Blanc out of the cool climate Walker Bay region. As one might expect, the core aromas and flavors were similar in both glasses-fruity gooseberry and citrus aromas with bright citrus flavors with a grassy note on the long, flavorful finish. The second wine tasted was a 2004 Schoffit Chasselas Vielles Vignes from Alsace. Here, too, the core aromas and flavors were similar in both glasses-a ripe, tropical nose with mango and coconut notes and distinct very ripe pineapple flavors on the palate. Did the tasting experience differ at all between the two glasses? The answer is a definite "yes". Compared to the other glass, the MP wine glass evoked somewhat more complex aromas-including an additional element of wet stones in the Sauvignon Blanc-and better overall balance both in smell and taste. The core aromas were toned down a bit in the MP glass, allowing other olfactory notes to emerge, resulting in a more complex and better balanced bouquet. Since smell and taste are closely related, this also resulted in the sense of more complex and integrated flavors on the palate.
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