(Manfred Klimek, WELT am SONNTAG, Getty Stock free)
There it stands, amongst my many everyday wine glasses. It stands there all on its own, like a survivor from another era: my last Vinum Bordeaux glass from the Kufstein-based glassblowers Riedel. Bought in 1988, just as I was beginning not only to drink wine but also to learn to appreciate it. Back then, Riedel stood alone as a manufacturer of hand-blown, high-quality glasses. Anyone who knew anything about wine drank from a Riedel glass. In the 1980s and early 1990s, these glasses practically gave wine a new lease of life. There were once six Bordeaux glasses. Today, only one remains.
I hardly ever pick it up anymore. The fear that it might shatter is too great – whether from setting it down too firmly, washing it or polishing it. Such an end would be far too banal. One wrong press, a tiny crack, a dull clink, and forty years of wine memories would vanish in a pile of shards. What would remain then would be memory without a body, an orchestra without a sound.
For this glass holds the history of my wine-drinking. It has tasted Lafite and Latour; it has given form to the first wines I ever bought myself – both the unaffordable and the affordable ones – and to the many spontaneous purchases made out of curiosity, perfectly conveying the winemakers’ work to my dining table. It held the magnificent 1982 Figeac – and thus cemented my love of Bordeaux. On long nights, it made the colour of Pomerol glow – even more so than the kitsch candlelight I used to let set the mood at every red-wine tasting session back then. It also endured the bad buys – the bitter, the harsh, the unripe wines – which I used to gloss over back then with the self-assured air of someone who knew nothing. This glass swallowed it all. Without judgement. And whilst its fellow glasses, delivered at the same time, went the way of all flesh one by one, this glass became the last glass standing. The survivor.
So why is this one glass so dear to me? Perhaps because it embodies a constancy that viticulture and I never had. Winemakers came and went, vintages changed, my preferences shifted, yet this glass remained, relentlessly, the benchmark for everything I poured into it. Its curve, its upward sweep, the way it concentrates the aromas and then releases them – all of that has become ingrained in me. When I drink from it today, the wine tastes different, denser, closer to what I expect and yet transcending it. And of course, much of this is also projection, a touch of self-deception – never mind! This one glass also always takes me back to those years when glasses were not yet interchangeable, but vessels of a new world, the entirety of which no one could possibly discover in a single lifetime.
Needless to say, I rarely use it. Perhaps once a year, when I have a wine that this glass deserves. But then there’s always the risk. I handle the glass more carefully than any other; I wash it by hand and dry it with a soft cloth, as if it were a child. And when I put it back in the cupboard, I know: it’s still there. The promise still lies behind its glass, which has become slightly cloudy from all the polishing.
It’s a sentimental story, to be sure. But it says something about wine. That it doesn’t just age in the cask, nor just in the bottle. But within us, too. That we need tools, vessels, to which our life story attaches itself. This glass is the last witness to my journey as a wine-drinker, a wine writer – and also as a winegrower. My only remaining witness, who has been there all these years.
I know: one day, even this glass will shatter in the most ordinary way. Probably, as is so often the case, not at the bowl but at the stem. Perhaps, however, it will outlive me and then serve my son, who will inherit it. But until then, it will hold firm – my large, thin-walled piece of memory. That which remains in later life.