Enough with the flute! Let's free ourselves from this useless and damaging glass. Let's go back to the goblet

We despise the flute. It brings sadness. And for those with a keen nose, it creates a certain discomfort. Let's give ourselves a great gift for 2024: let's rid ourselves of flute-shaped glasses. They seem designed by a Korean engineer who decided not to let us taste the wine's flavor. Sometimes it's even a good thing. While they enhance the bubbles and hold the pressure well, they excessively trivialize all the aromatic nuances. In short, they cancel the wine's essence, uniqueness, and poetry.

You can pour inside them a Falanghina sparkling wine, a Cartizze, a Franciacorta Satèn, or a Champagne disgorged in 1998 under a starry sky, but it will always play the same tune inside. Furthermore, let's say it, they're not even visually appealing; they grip the wine like a coat three sizes too small, they're not very capacious, they give a sense of limitation, constriction. They don't inspire dreams.

And instead, sparkling wines need to breathe. To free themselves to meet us, to lighten our everyday tables and days. Not just at Christmas, when it's too late for panettone or too early for gifts, or on the 31st on New Year's Eve when the soundtrack inevitably falls on the usual trash playlist. When we order sparkling wine at the restaurant, we ask for a glass change half the time. True, there are slightly more urgent concerns, but it would take so little.

Happy 2024 (without flutes)

Let's remove the flute from all public consumption places. That feeling of a phial, of a sample ready to go to the laboratory, really puts a damper on things. Moreover, they're quite inconvenient for toasting: what's the use of the flute? Why is it so widespread worldwide? We can't give an answer to this conspiracy planned against lovers of good drinking.

Let's resort to common sense. In essence, let's widen the glass based on the structure of the uncorked sparkling wine: for young cuvées and more generally for all products from the Italian Method (e.g., Prosecco), a tulip with a narrow rim is perfectly fine. When we increase in intensity and have cuvées with many months on lees, let's broaden the belly of the glass.

Open the old beliefs

Let's keep in mind that Blanc de Noirs wines typically have more structure and marry better with more capacious glasses, the same goes for rosé, reserves, or old disgorgements where the concentration is higher. We'll soon return to the topic with specific cases; the matter is serious and it concerns humanity's future. In fact, glasses and serving temperature make all the difference in the world. Before concluding, do you remember the good old goblet gathering dust in the cupboard since the 1980s? Let's bring it back into vogue, let's dust it off properly: it screams celebration. It's aesthetically pleasing and that vintage touch pairs so well with the festive spirit.

Cover photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova