Riedel has introduced nationally in the U.S. a jet-black glass called the Blind Blind Tasting Glass. In addition to concealing wines’ grape, type, region, producer and vintage — as is the case in normal blind tastings — this glass hides wines’ color, (white, red or rosé), depth of color, clarity, brilliance, and effervescence.

The Blind Blind Tasting Glass was designed for wine drinkers who don’t want to form pre-conceived judgments prior to tasting, who want to taste fully blind. Given that humans’ first sense in judging wine is sight (in fact, blind-folded tasters have not infrequently confused red and white wines), this glass removes all visual cues. Beyond color, the Blind Blind glass precludes immediately judging, for example, a pale-red Barolo as thin, or a deep purple pinot noir as rich. It is indeed the world’s first double-blind glass.

The Blind Blind Tasting Glass (8400/15) employs Riedel’s most versatile bowl, the Zinfandel/Chianti (87/8” high with a 133/8 ounce bowl) and like other glasses in the Sommeliers collection is hand-made of full-lead crystal. The glass achieves its blackness through the addition of manganese oxide; a little of this metal turns glass purple, a little more turns it pitch black.

Interestingly, an experiment by Rome’s Fondazione Santa Lucia Neuroscientific Research and Cure Institute shows precisely why the Blind-Blind Tasting Glass has a function. In Dr. Alessandro Castriota Scanderbeg’s experiment, the Santa Lucia team placed plastic tubes in the mouths’ of 14 men, seven sommeliers and seven consumers, through which each tasted three different wines (a white, a red and a sweet) while their brains were scanned under functional MRIs, allegedly a first. In results presented at the International Wine Academy in Rome on May 27, 2003, Dr. Scanderbeg announced that the sommeliers, the wine experts, used more intellect and emotion in processing taste.

While both groups’ primary and secondary gustatory brain areas were activated, the frontal cortex – where language, recognition, memory and emotion are processed – was activated in all the sommeliers but none of the normal subjects. Dr. Scanderbeg surmised that the experts greater knowledge of wine gave them a richer drinking experience though, according to Jacob Gaffney in the September 15, 2003 Wine Spectator, several of the sommeliers complained that they couldn’t fully enjoy the wines without smelling them. If only Santa Lucia had had the Blind-Blind Tasting Glass. For additional information on the experiment, visit http://www.hsantalucia.it/cong/vini.htm, or contact bmallebrein@pelagus.it

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