MAXIMILIAN RIEDEL and his father, Georg.

"I’ve told my public relations people they can quit once I’m on the cover of Time," Riedel says, with only a hint of a smile. The 28-year-old CEO is reedy enough to pass for a teenager except that, as head of Riedel Crystal USA, this 11th-generation heir of a 250-year-old Austrian glassmaking dynasty dresses and acts the part of a driven corporate despot. The words "exact" and "precise" often punctuate his conversation.

Like any successful CEO, he stays plugged in. He downloads several dozen emails each morning from Riedel’s headquarters in Austria, where his father, Georg, commands the international company. He then makes the hour drive from his home in Hoboken, N.J., to his office in Edison, all the while talking by cell phone to his assistant. At the office, he emails terse missives to staff; some contain only two words: "See me."

"I have about 200 emails every day, and I need to respond to all of them and to know everything," Riedel admits. "Is this good? For sure it’s not good, but this is how I learned. Everything goes through me."

He often ends his day entertaining retail store clients or visiting vintners at Per Se or Restaurant Daniel, where Riedel loosens up and plays the amiable bon vivant. Friends, such as chefs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, stop at his table. Girlfriend Dani Behr, an Austrian ballerina turned fashion designer, usually accompanies him. He might also bring a prototype for one of his newest decanters or wineglasses and fill it with the contents of a rare vintage. Showing off a wine available only to select customers is in his nature, Riedel concedes. "I’m extremely competitive. I can’t turn it off."

Go West
His ambitious side has been a surprise and a great relief to his father. He sent the then-23-year-old to New York in 2001 and was fully prepared to spend much of his own time commuting across the Atlantic if his son needed his help. "I’m amazed by how he’s been able to focus, and he’s become such an industry superstar," Georg now says.

Georg had to expand the company’s overseas presence, prompted by a declining demand for wineglasses in Europe, along with the continent’s declining birthrate. Maximilian thinks he was also wary of the father-son conflicts that are part of the family history. "He said, ‘Before you and I fight, I’ll give you a market and let you take care of it,’" Maximilian recalls. Georg often argued with his own father, Claus Riedel, who died in 2004.

"My grandfather was a crazy genius," Riedel says. "He was the first to discover that glass shape influenced wine, but he was Bohemian—in nationality and lifestyle—and he had no relationship to money." Claus brought the company back to life in the 1950s when he purchased a bankrupt glassblowing factory in Austria. After meticulous experiments, he began designing glasses—eggshell thin, museum-quality, handblown glasses—shaped to release the best flavors of each of the important European regional wines. In previous eras, the Riedels had produced other glass products, including windowpanes and perfume bottles. During World War II, the Allies drove the family into exile from their home in Sudetenland because they had been making picture tubes for Luftwaffe radar. When Georg took over from Claus in 1994, however, the Riedel wineglass business was nearly bankrupt, and Georg set to work changing what he saw as his father’s elitist focus. He adapted to new machine technologies for producing crystal glasses and introduced some 30 wineglasses matched to grape varieties instead of regions.

Growing up in this precarious dynasty, the young Riedel adhered to the long tradition of family boys who showed little interest in school. "I was a bad student," he says, not without a note of pride. "My father probably told me too soon that he was a bad student, that my grandfather was a bad student and that being a bad student was in our genes."

If You Can Make It There
When Riedel began his real-world training in the United States, he rented an apartment in Columbia University’s International House and glimpsed his first cockroach—he jumped in horror. Michael Aaron, chairman of Manhattan’s Sherry-Lehmann Wine & Spirits, which sells Riedel glasses, remembers one of his first visits from Riedel. "He was nervous and very young, and didn’t seem all that secure on his own." But within a few months, Aaron says, "He was a changed person. He’s the most amazing salesperson, and socially, he’s extraordinary. We’ve had him to dinner parties with our friends, and by the end of the evening, they’re all ordering his glasses."

"I have about 200 emails every day, and I need to respond to all of them and to know everything. Is this good? For sure it’s not good, but this is how I learned. Everything has to go through me."

Riedel remembers his metamorphosis as a simple case of plunging in and learning. He became as impassioned as his father and grandfather about getting the glass just right, an obsession that seems to have begun with his invention of what the company calls the "O" glass. It is a stemless, dishwasher-safe glass that retails for $20 a pair—a breakthrough in economy for a company whose most famous glass, the Bordeaux Grand Cru Maxi, sells for $289. Riedel always tells people he was inspired to create a stemless glass when he moved to New York and lived with limited cabinet space.

The glass has won him a cast of admirers in a growing market. "The O glass is genius," says Brian Rosen, chief operating officer of Sam’s Wines & Spirits in Chicago, which has sold Riedel glasses for the past 14 years. "Max has made Riedel not just about the rich man drinking fine wines in his chateau, but also the regular guy who’s drinking a Pinot Noir from Oregon and still wants the right glass."

The U.S. division had annual sales of only $18 million when the young Riedel took over. But his father has since added to it, in 2004 acquiring their largest competitor, F.X. Nachtmann, a maker of mass-market crystal wineglasses, which in turn owns Spiegelau, making Riedel the largest wine glass manufacturer in the world. The combined company has annual sales of about $280 million and employs nearly 2,000 workers. Last year U.S. sales were $52 million. Riedel now produces nearly 200 different items: wineglasses, decanters and demitasse sets.

In all probability, there will come a day when Riedel’s father offers him control of the entire company. The Riedels have always adapted their product lines to the needs around them and the talents of the reigning chief executive, but Riedel’s early start has left him enamored of his New World fiefdom, and he is in no hurry to return home. "If I’d stayed under my father in Austria, I wouldn’t have been able to breathe," he says. And despite all that he would like to accomplish, impending demands could put a crimp in the fun-loving side of his personality.

"When we come home after dinner, the first thing I do is plug in my computer. I don’t understand how this gorgeous woman is still with me, because all I do is answer emails," Riedel admits, grinning and looking at Behr. "Whenever I think about long-term future plans, to be honest, I don’t know if I’m going to be at Riedel. I hope to be lucky enough to have a generation that wants to push me off the farm."

Jackie Cooperman is a freelance writer based in New York.