CHAMPAGNE
Stemware
Flutes to champagne are like a head cold to a nez or mittens to a flutist. You won't sense much. To really taste champagne you must taste it with your nose, so to speak, and for that you need plenty of air in the glass and curvature. A straight-walled narrow crevasse of a flute filled to the brim with icy champagne will smell of nothing, like the Arctic. Below are my favorite stems but any tulip-shaped glass with a reasonably thin "lip" will do. For a broad range of impressions, try the same wine from different glasses. Zalto recommends using the dishwasher, by the way. Unscented soap de rigueur and silicone stemholders for extra fine stems.
Favorites: Zalto Burgundy glass, Zalto Champagne glass, and Gabriel Glas Gold.
The next most important thing for tasting champagne is its temperature. Skip the ice bucket. Try it warmer than you think you'll like it: from the fridge at its warmest setting, after 10 minutes in the glass, at room temperature. You'll like it.
The last thing is time. Time in the glass to breathe, to warm up, to unfurl like the peonies just in from the florist. Don't chug it, you don't have to finish the bottle. Champagne tastes very good, and sometimes even better, on the second day. Won't it go flat? It won't with these corks.
Zalto Burgundy Glass is almost always in my tasting lineup, especially for older champagne. The contrast between its wide bowl and its slim stem is striking. This extreme shape, not traditionally thought suited for champagne, creates a kind of microclimate, a protected air bubble like in a tropical exhibit under the glass dome of a botanical garden. The wine vapor is suspended in the roomy space inside the glass and you can really immerse your palate in the concentrated, nearly humid fragrance of the champagne. True, the streaming vertical of effervescence is not possible in Zalto Burgundy but the opulence of the aromatics it serves up more than compensates for the lost fireworks of carbonation. This glass weighs 120 grams.
Gabriel Glas Gold Glass is the finest of the stems on this page. Mouthblown like the others, it is unmatched in delicacy and elegance. One of Peter Liem's favorites as well. This glass weighs 80 grams.
Zalto Champagne Glass is a beautiful statuesque glass that showcases champagne's bubbles without compromising its aromatics. There is sufficient room for the fragrance to develop, provided you keep the glass under 3/4 full. Weight 75 grams.
Zalto Universal Glass has received much criticism from Terry Theise, who calls it "dreaded" and even "repulsive" because it "splits apart the structure and cohesion of most wines and hurls them onto the floor like a chaos of jigsaw puzzle pieces." I don't dislike it at all but admittedly, I don't reach for it often either. Simply because Universal falls somewhere in the middle of the shape range and I enjoy stronger contrasts between the more extreme examples. It's a fine glass nonetheless with clean classical proportions like an unadorned Doric column. Weight 110 grams.
Zalto White Wine Glass is good alternative to Zalto Champagne when you want a little more room but still enough verticality to enjoy the ribbons of effervescence. Peter Liem mentions this glass in his article Choosing a Wine Glass for Critical Tasting, noting that it "tends to focus on acidity yet curiously, it struggles with balancing sugar, thus favoring non-dosé or very low-dosage champagnes." It weighs 85 grams.
Zalto Bordeaux Glass is another large wine glass that I sometimes use for champagne. Less tapered than the Burgundy, it still works well to accentuate the aromatics, moderate the acidity, and open up a reticent wine. This glass weighs 125 grams.
Jancis Robinson Glass by Richard Brandon is the darling of the critics like Peter Liem, who uses it exclusively for evaluating champagnes, and Terry Theise, who finds it "nearly always preferable to the Zalto Universal" and calls it "indispensable" and "fundamentally successful." Surprisingly, I do not love the Jancis because it is large-footed and heavyish for its size. Even worse, for me this glass tends to serve up a "jet-blast of manic chalkiness", to quote TT once more, when other glasses do not. Finally, the wine coats this glass oddly, leaving unattractive irregular droplets, while other glasses remain clear. 120 grams.
Lehmann Lallement Glass is mentioned favorably by both Liem and Theise. Unfortunately, it is somewhat thick in the stem and that spoils the otherwise photogenic profile. It feels simpler than the others on this page and I don't love it but again, it does photograph very well. This glass weighs 90 grams.
Photography and writing by @gaiwanstyle.