Maximilian Riedel’s family has kept the furnaces running at their glass-making business for 11 generations. He’s worried that Europe’s gas standoff with Russia might break that legacy.
Riedel, founded in 1756, runs a three-year lead time to source specialist materials for the luxury wine glasses and decanters it produces, and furnaces used to melt glass can break if they are allowed to cool. This means that a pause in production due to energy rationing would temporarily put the company out of operation.
“I’m steaming ahead, hoping that we’re not the Titanic,” Riedel, 44, said in a Zoom interview from the company’s headquarters in the Austrian Alpine town of Kufstein. The energy crunch is making “everything uncertain and business people are very nervous,” he said.
