Impractical Beauty – The Eve Decanter

Working as a food photographer for food magazines often means that I end up doing a lot of food and beverage-related product photography as well. While this includes modest shots of packaging, it also sometimes includes more complex shots. For the May issue of Feast magazine, I was tasked with the job of photographing the Riedel Eve Wine Decanter. This thing is totally a thing of beauty … and completely impractical for every-day use. It’s so complicated to use, in fact, that the manufacturer has a YouTube video on how to use the thing.

Part of the shoot included pouring wine into the decanter (for the cover shot above) and since this took more than a few takes, I had to empty the decanter many times. I found that I had trouble emptying the decanter in a BUCKET, let alone trying to pour the wine into a single wine glass. And don’t even get me started on cleaning it. Instead of actually cleaning it, the manufacturer suggests that using it often or rinsing it with white wine is a better plan. I found that even though I was able to rinse all of the red wine out of the decanter, the water that I poured in refused to evaporate, even after a week sitting in the open air. Luckily for me, since the decanter was on loan, the store we borrowed it from had a special cleaning tool, so we didn’t need to keep the thing.

Beautiful? Yup. Practical? Um, no.