Why I’m a Champagne Glass Snob (and You Should Be Too)

Let me get one thing straight from the off: I am not a wine snob. I’ll happily drink a £12 bottle on a Tuesday and tell you I enjoyed it. But glassware? That’s a different story entirely. There is no bigger glassware snob on this earth than me, and I’ve made my peace with it.

My cabinets at home are a shrine to the idea that the right glass makes the drink. I’ve got gin glasses. I’ve got two different types of whisky glasses, because of course a peaty Islay wants something different to a soft Speyside. I’ve got shot glasses in more styles than any sane person needs. And then there’s the good stuff — my Zalto and my Riedel — handled like they’re made of eggshell, because more or less, they are.

I’ve also got a shelf of cheap wine glasses. Those are for guests. Specifically, the guests who don’t know better — the ones who’d happily clink a hand-blown Zalto against a bottle to say cheers and give me a heart attack in the process. If you’ve ever “cheersed” a Riedel hard enough to hear that lovely high ping, you already know the small death I die every time it happens.

A quick tour of the cabinet (or: my credentials)

People think I’m joking about the glasses until they come round. So here, for the record, is roughly what’s in rotation:

None of this makes me sophisticated. It makes me particular. There’s a difference, and the difference is that I can actually taste it — and once you can, you can’t un-taste it.

I’ve been drinking champagne from a wine glass for years

Here’s my hill, and I will die on it: champagne belongs in a wine glass, not a flute.

And I want it on record that I was doing this years before it became fashionable. Long before five-star restaurants and upscale weddings started quietly swapping the flutes for proper glasses, I was the one being difficult about it. Asking — insisting, really — at nice restaurants and at weddings, to the visible confusion of more than one sommelier who’s since come round to my way of thinking.

These days the trade has caught up: in 2025 you’ll find whole restaurants with a “no flutes in the building” policy. Finally, welcome, everyone. I saved you a seat.

I’ll be honest — I haven’t drunk champagne from a flute in years. If I’m somewhere that only has flutes and won’t give me a wine glass, I simply won’t have the champagne. I’d rather go without than drink it wrong. I appreciate how that sounds. I’ve decided I don’t care.

The science: why the glass genuinely changes the drink

This isn’t me being precious for the sake of it. The shape of the glass physically changes what reaches your nose and mouth, and champagne — good champagne — is all about the nose.

A champagne’s character lives in its aromas: the brioche and toast from time on the lees, the citrus, the orchard fruit, the little hazelnut and honey notes in an older bottle. Those aromas are volatile compounds — they lift off the surface of the wine and gather in the space above it, ready for you to breathe in. To get them, you need two things: enough surface area for them to evaporate, and enough bowl for them to pool before they reach your nose.

A wine glass gives you both. A wide, rounded bowl lets the wine breathe and open up, then the tapering rim funnels all that complexity straight to you. A flute gives you neither. That skinny little chimney has almost no surface area, so the aromas never really develop, and what little does escape shoots straight past your nose along with a face full of prickly CO₂. You end up smelling fizz and acid instead of the actual wine. You’re drinking a £60 bottle and getting maybe a fifth of what you paid for.

Don’t take my word for it — take Riedel’s. As Maximilian Riedel puts it, their champagne wine glass “allows the range of aromas of champagne to unfold in a way which is not possible with a narrow flute.” Or take Krug, who are so anti-flute they call it a “kill the flute” crusade. Their view, memorably, is that drinking great champagne from a flute is like listening to opera with earplugs. They even spent 18 months with Riedel developing a proper glass (the Joseph) to prove the point.

 

Drinking Krug from a flute “is like listening to opera with earplugs.”
— Maggie Henríquez, former CEO of Krug

When two of the most obsessive names in glass and in champagne are both telling you the flute is wrong, it might be time to retire the flute.

The flute: a marketing triumph, a flavour disaster

What really baffles me is the direction of travel. You’d think, knowing all this, that flutes would be quietly disappearing. Instead they’ve gone the other way — taller, slimmer, more “elegant,” more Instagrammable. Every year they look more like a design object and less like something you’d actually want to drink out of.

And I’ve become convinced it’s almost by design. The modern flute seems engineered to do one job: show off a pretty stream of bubbles while making absolutely sure the wine never opens up. It looks the part for the photo and the toast, and it strangles the drink in the same breath. It’s style with the flavour deliberately left in the fridge — which brings me neatly to my other grievance.

While I’m here: stop serving champagne ice cold

Don’t get me started on serving temperature. Actually, too late.

The flute has a nasty accomplice, and it’s the ice bucket. Champagne is so often served straight from something close to freezing — barely above fridge-cold — that the aromas are locked shut before they ever get a chance. Cold mutes flavour; that’s just physics. Serve a lovely champagne at 4°C in a narrow flute and you’ve built the perfect machine for tasting nothing at all: no warmth to release the aromas, no bowl to catch them if they tried.

Non-vintage is at its best around 8–10°C, and a richer, older or vintage bottle wants to be warmer still, closer to 10–12°C — nearer white-wine territory than the Arctic. Let it come up a few degrees, put it in a glass with some room, and it’ll actually tell you what it’s got. (If you want the full rant on getting the conditions right, I’ve written about how to store and serve champagne properly elsewhere — yes, I have opinions there too.)

So what should you actually drink it from?

You don’t need to remortgage for a cabinet like mine. You just need to lose the flute. In ascending order of my personal obsession:

A plain white wine glass — the one you already own — is already a huge upgrade on a flute. Bigger bowl, room to breathe, aromas actually arrive. Start here and you’ll immediately get why I’m like this.

A dedicated Riedel champagne wine glass (the Veritas, or the Dom Pérignon collaboration if you’re feeling flush) is purpose-built: enough bowl to open the wine up, a little etched “sparkling point” at the base to keep a fine, steady bead going. This is the sweet spot for most people, and where my everyday drinking lives.

And then, for the bottles that deserve it, my beloved Zalto. Absurdly thin, absurdly light, absurdly expensive, and — I’m sorry — absurdly good. Drinking a proper champagne from a Zalto is the closest a glass gets to disappearing entirely, leaving just you and the wine. It’s the whole reason I’ve got a shelf of cheap ones out front for the clinkers.

Call me a snob. I’ve been called worse, usually while refusing a flute at a wedding. But pour the same bottle into a flute and then into a good wine glass, side by side, and taste them back to back. You’ll never look at a flute the same way again — and you’ll finally understand why, in this one very specific corner of my life, I’m completely insufferable.

If you’re building a collection worth drinking properly, start with the bottles actually worth buying — and if you’re going all the way to the top, my Dom Pérignon guide will keep you honest. Just promise me you won’t drink any of it from a flute.