Machine-made wine glasses: as thin as mouth-blown

Wdrinkers live in a two-class society. Those who can and want to afford it drink their white or red from hand-blown glasses. Handcrafted specimens are thinner and more delicate than the mass that emerges from the machine. The stem feels more elegant, the lips hardly feel the rim of the glass while drinking. This is good for wine and winegrowers, because the feel of the vessel usually has a positive influence on the taste of the content. Because the glasses from the upper class are made by people who specialize in this craft, who have learned it over the years and can only practice it with a lot of experience, these specimens usually cost a multiple of the industrially manufactured products.

And rightly so. Anyone who has ever watched glassblowers at work in a factory knows how great the effort is to produce a single glass and how many of them do not make it through the final inspection. Anyone who hasn’t seen anything like this before is usually just appalled at the prices for hand-blown wine glasses.

Now there are obviously enough wine lovers who are willing to spend big bucks on handmade products. Because Riedel, the pioneer of hand-made wine glasses, has been followed over the past two decades by a number of companies such as Eisch, Gabriel-Glas, Josephinenhütte, Stölzle, Zalto, Zwiesel and others that produce and sell hand-blown versions on a larger scale. Especially during the pandemic, the sales of many companies increased. Some manufacturers offer their glass series both as a machine and as a hand-made series. This offers suitable illustrative material for a wine glass introductory course, because the difference between the two production methods can be clearly seen. However, some wine drinkers do not opt ​​for the machine version for financial reasons, but because they are worried that the thin-walled glasses will break too quickly.

Until now, it has not been possible for companies to optimize the machines in such a way that the products have a similarly fine appearance to the glasses from the manufactory. Or they didn’t try it to keep the distinction. Riedel Glas is now going on the offensive – and advertises with superlatives. The models from the new Veloce range are the thinnest machine-made wine glasses on the market. The fact that Riedel Glas of all people is now launching such glasses on the market, which can hardly be distinguished from mouth-blown ones, is surprising at first. Even if the company “only” produces 250,000 hand-blown glasses and decanters in Kufstein and 59 million machine-made pieces in Amberg and Weiden each year, Riedel has become well-known with its manufactory and in 2000 was actually the only company producing hand-blown glasses on a large scale manufactured.

Managing director Maximilian Riedel tries a balancing act with series like Veloce. “Because the competition has been producing mouth-blown glasses in the East at low wages for more than ten years, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up economically with production in Kufstein, Austria,” says Riedel. Machine-made but craft-like lenses like Veloce are the answer. At around 25 euros each, they are below the lowest prices for mouth-blown products. According to Riedel, it would also be necessary to convert production to machines in the next few decades because “the glassblowing trade is threatened with extinction”. But as long as there is still this “master performance”, this “Formula 1” in the craft, they want to keep the manufactory alive – as long as it is possible. It is also essential for “fine tuning” and developing new products. Asia is also an important market. There, the demand for glasses handmade in Austria is high.