Yardley inventor and entrepreneur Peter Rigas is okay with being an iconoclast. Last year, he unveiled a new take on a product that has remained essentially unchanged for centuries–the wineglass. His patented Silhouette glass is basically a standard wine glass with a notch cut into it that allows the user to take in more fully all the aromas of a wine.
“We looked at it and thought, you know, flavor comes from your sense of smell. Your tongue has four taste points–bitter, sweet, sour and salt. But your nose can discern up to ten thousand different flavors,” Rigas says. “So this was a way to let your nose in the game and get the full flavor and characteristics of wine.”
Throughout his 20 years in the restaurant business, Rigas has come up with more than a few ideas for inventions. But his Silhouette glass, which was launched last year, is the first idea to come to fruition and enter full production.
To get the invention out of his head and into the marketplace took Rigas about a year and a half, he says, including four months just to find a suitable factory, which he finally found in the Czech Republic, “home of the world’s greatest glass-cutters.”
Rigas’ company, Tomzi International, has a handful of patents and household products in various stages of development, including a product called Versatile Valet, which will begin selling through QVC sometime next month, according to Rigas.
But unlike his other inventions, his novel wineglass has evoked strong reactions–for and against, which pleases Rigas.
“We didn’t expect to be embraced by the wine world. Whenever you have something truly revolutionary, the experts in the field are not the people that are the first adopters,” Rigas says; he is undaunted by the experts. “We know our product works and we know it’s revolutionary. When somebody puts it side by side with any other glass in the marketplace and they actually taste, they may or may not like the product, but they can’t deny the fact that it does taste better and you do smell more and it does work.”
Source: Peter Rigas, founder of Tomzi International
Writer: John Davidson
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