I had to buy some more wine glasses the other day. I’ve always used Spiegelau ones at home – good quality, but not so expensive that breaking them induces a panic attack. They’re sensible, useful, good-looking. But they do not make the heart sing.

Which made me think – do I pay through the nose for something more dangerously, exquisitely, ethereally fragile, or settle for practicality? Perfection is reached when the two coincide. But in the accoutrements of wine, they often don’t.

Eighteenth-century English wine glasses are glorious. The colour of the glass (colourless, obviously, but ideally with the faintest grey tint to its colourlessness), the texture of the glass, the shapes, the minute imperfections. And those imperfections are there by accident, with the aim of perfection; they are totally different to the deliberate imperfections of modern hand-made tiles, for example, with faux-clumsiness built into the spec. You can tell later machine-cut glass from earlier hand-cutting because with the latter you can follow the movement of the hand doing the cutting: it’s a direct link between you, here, today, and a craftsman in a glassworks 200 years ago. The imperfections are only visible if you look very closely, but overall they give an 18th-century glass a human feel. Like books, they are agreeable companions in a room. But they are useless for drinking. Eighteeenth-century wine glasses are far too small and completely the wrong shape. And by the time you get to the late 19th century glasses combine the dullness of mass-production with shapes that we would not choose nowadays. It was all downhill after about 1830.

Modern wine glasses are soulless. They are indifferent. Arrange them on a dinner table and they can look good. But they are relentlessly practical. The most subversive thing they do is bend. If you squeeze the rim very gently a good modern glass will bend slightly – just enough to remind you that, as your school science books told you, glass is a liquid. (Years ago, at dinner with the Riedels in Austria, I bent one of his glasses in just that way; Georg went slightly pale and told me to stop, because I could cut myself and they weren’t insured. I’m not either, so do not try this at home.)

What about decanters? Tell me when you’re bored. You can pick up decanters made c.1800 for a tenner or so in junk shops, even today. They’ve lost their stoppers, but who needs the stopper, honestly? They are objects of great beauty and grace, and perfect practicality. A winding tube of glass made by Riedel can also be a thing of beauty, but to my mind loses points for practicality. The sommelier at Hide restaurant in London uses one so big he slings it over his shoulder and resembles some figure from classical mythology, but I wouldn’t want to be him getting through a narrow doorway.

But decanters can be practical in other ways too. I came across…

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