From wine educators and James Beard Award-winners, everyone agrees: The best thing to drink Champagne out of is a wine glass. But there’s a lot of fine print to that statement, and if you don’t traditionally spend $40 or more on a bottle of Champagne to drink at home, a flute will still do the job nicely. Plus, it has an elegant look that differs from a wine glass, and often, that’s what drinking Champagne is all about. At this point, I’ve considered more than 80 glasses in varying shapes and sizes and have put 10 different styles through a total of 12 hours of testing. After examining three brand new models, the Schott Zwiesel 1872 Enoteca Champagne Glass is our top choice for most people.
Our Pick
Zwiesel 1872 Enoteca
Tall, lightweight, titanium crystal in a perfectly balanced package.
After almost a year of testing various flutes in all shapes and sizes, one thing has become distinctly clear: The most important quality in a Champagne flute is whether or not you feel good when you hold it. The Enoteca is taller, lighter, and thinner than any glass I’ve tried, and it’s a pleasure to drink from. The tulip shape also walks the line between the elegant profile of a flute and the more useful (aromatically speaking) bowl of a traditional wine glass. A tiny, imperceptible etching keeps your wine carbonated for as long as possible.
Also Great
$50 on Amazon
Runner-up
Riedel Vinum Cuvee Prestige
The Riedel Vinum is a high-quality glass made of leaded crystal. It’s heavier than our main pick.
The most effective at preserving carbonation in our tests, the Riedel Vinum is slightly less expensive than our top choice. However, it’s made of leaded crystal, which makes it much heavier and less fun than our pick. Next to the Vinum, the taller profile of the Enoteca steals the show, but if $80 for a set is a little much, these will not disappoint.
Also Great
$8 on Crate & Barrel
Budget option
Crate & Barrel Silhouette
A budget option in a similar shape, best for entertaining larger groups.
The Crate & Barrel Silhouette Champagne Flute lacks the refinement of our top choice, but the tall, balanced glass has the same shape as our pick for a lot less cash. The Silhouette is made of regular soda-lime glass, so it’s a more little prone to shattering than our pick. There are also no effervescence etchings on the inside. For an inexpensive basic to round out your collection or stock up for a cocktail party, the Silhouette is a good option.
We still love our former pick, the Schott Zwiesel Vinao, but it has become increasingly hard to find. Sur La Table has stopped carrying it, and though it’s available here, there is now a $9 shipping fee added to the cost of the glass. Due to the increase in cost, shrinking supply, and availability of other good options, we decided to move on.
Table of contents
Should I get this?
How we picked and tested
Our pick
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The runner-up
The budget pick
Why the experts use wine glasses, not flutes
What about coupes?
Bubbles and shapes
The competition
Care and maintenance
Wrapping it up
Should I get this?
If you regularly spend more than $40 on a bottle of Champagne to drink at home, or more than $25 for sparkling wine like Prosecco, then consider drinking out of a wine glass. It will let the aromatics open and develop (see the section on what the experts say below). Check out our full guide to wine glasses for recommendations that will be great for wine and Champagne.
But if your goal is to make an occasion in your home feel special, then a flute is a must! They do have a purpose above and beyond aesthetics—flutes are designed to make sure your wine doesn’t go flat. But since flutes don’t enhance aromas, they’re mostly about creating a memorable drinking experience. There are also certain Champagne cocktails, like the French 75, that are traditionally served in a flute, so they can be a nice addition to a growing collection of barware, too.
Flutes excel at keeping your bubbly bubbly.
How we picked and tested
The best flute for you is the one that makes you feel like a rock star when you hold it. But after having spent more than a year with several of our top choices, I’ve discovered several other details that really make a glass stand out.
To begin with, a tall and narrow flute is a really impractical shape for a vessel intended to hold liquid—they quickly become top-heavy and accident-prone. But a good Champagne glass will overcome those limitations. It will be able to hold a decent amount of liquid, at least 5 ounces, without feeling really unwieldy when you pick it up. And the rim won’t get in the way of your face or hit your nose when you drink, which has happened with 99 percent of the glasses I’ve tried. I physically couldn’t drink the booze out of them without really throwing it back, and that’s not the ideal way to enjoy Champagne. Perfect ergonomics for anteaters, but not for humans.
It should also do what it’s intended to do, which is preserve bubbles. This is accomplished most effectively by glasses that have effervescence points or vanishing point bowls. An effervescence point is a tiny etching, often invisible to the naked eye, inside the glass. It gives the Champagne bubbles a dedicated place to latch onto and release from in a slow, steady stream. A vanishing point bowl is a glass that tapers to a very fine point at the bottom, and they can also create this effect. But they’re a pain to maintain, gathering gunk in a tiny space you really have to work to clean out. I dismissed them from consideration.
Through the course of use, I discovered one of the most important qualities in a good Champagne glass is weight. Heavy glassware is for dark spirits and deep thoughts—Champagne demands something carefree, like the character of the drink itself, and if you’re carrying it around and holding it and refilling it all night, a light glass makes a difference.
They should also be made of the thinnest glass you can find. We spoke to Philippe Gouze, who is is the general manager of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, James Beard Award-winning chef Dan Barber’s world-renowned farm-to-table restaurant outside New York City. They work with glassware designer Deborah Ehrlich to create custom glass pieces for their tabletops. Philippe told us, “The thinner the glass the better the experience is, especially with Champagne because it’s such an effervescent drink, so precious, so beautiful… What I absolutely recommend for the home collection, if you’re gonna buy something, buy the thinnest crystal you can find.” So we paid attention to the thickness of the glass.
If you spend more than $40 on a glass, what you’re getting is a brand name or a specific design. Since at its heart, a Champagne flute is meant to make you feel special (as opposed to being a performance piece of glassware), there is an argument to be made for spending money on a brand that you identify with. So if you love Lalique and want to spend the money, do it. But higher-priced flutes have imperceptible advantages over anything in the $20-$50 range. Everyone who drinks Champagne for a living is putting it in a wine glass anyway.
If you spend less than about $25, the quality plummets dramatically. Often the product is made of pure glass (instead of some sort of fortified glass or crystal) and it shows. The flute is heavier, not as thin, and often clunkier. In a worst-case scenario, they can be a bit misshapen and the stems can be crooked. Though they seem small, once you notice these imperfections, you can’t unsee them! And you’ll be left wishing you went with a higher-quality product.
There’s very little existing editorial on what makes one flute better than another. This New York Times piece touches on a few that were tested by a panel of sommeliers, but it’s hardly definitive and not very current. Their preferred collections (that don’t cost $85+ each) include Riedel Ouverture, Riedel Vinum, Schott Zwiesel, and Pottery Barn.
A lot of the things that make a great flute, like quality of craftsmanship and type of glass, can be discovered by taking a cue from our wine glass guide. And the same brands that dominate the wine glass industry dominate in Champagne stemware as well. The heavy hitters are Riedel and Schott Zwiesel. I looked into products from Waterford, Mikasa, Rogaska, Lenox, and Kate Spade—well-known lifestyle brands you can find in a department store. The ultra-high-end brands such as Baccarat and Lalique were not considered, as they generally start at $100 per glass.
In this Chowhound thread people really get into talking about what they love about their glasses. In general, they want clear glass, good craftsmanship (no bulges, no bubbles, no crookedness), and a stem (to keep your hand off the bowl).
I ended up with nine glasses that I wanted to test. Glassware in person never looks like it does in pictures, so I checked to see how tall they were, what shape the bowls were, and how well they handled liquid. We also wanted to know if there was one particular shape of glass that excelled at preserving carbonation better than another shape. To test this, we topped up all of our choices with bubbly and tossed in a few Mentos. After observing how much fizz each glass produced, we got a little perspective on how well each could potentially keep your drink carbonated. Tulip shaped bowls were the big winner, in both practicality of use and bubble preservation.
Our pick
Our Pick
Zwiesel 1872 Enoteca
Tall, lightweight, titanium crystal in a perfectly balanced package.
The Schott Zwiesel 1872 Enoteca Champagne Glass ($40) is a new release from Schott and has replaced the Schott Zwiesel Vinao as our top choice. It wasn’t part of our original round of testing last year, but embodies all of the same top qualities as our former pick. And actually, it’s much finer. The very thin glass is made of durable titanium crystal, and it strikes a tall, elegant profile at 9.75 inches without becoming top-heavy. The bowl is the ideal tulip shape, which gives a little breathing room for the wine and helps keep bubbles moving slowly. It holds a little more than 10 oz., which is perfect, because that means a 5 oz. pour of Champagne will only fill it halfway, which will keep it balanced. The base of the glass is broad and flat, almost a full 3 inches in diameter, adding even more stability. Most importantly, I was more excited to use this glass than any of the dozens of products I’ve used.
During our observations in testing, there were two glass shapes that distinctly kept bubbles marching along in slow, steady streams: round glasses and tulip glasses. The Enoteca is a tulip-shaped glass, meaning it has a slightly fatter middle section and curves inward slightly at the top. Both bloggers and pros have reported that this shape can provide more of a connoisseur’s experience without forsaking the specialness of the flute shape entirely. It also holds liquid without getting top-heavy.
Bubbles are formed in Champagne when the carbon dissolved in the beverage latches onto a particle, forms a pocket, and then floats upwards. Some Champagne glasses are laser engraved with “nucleation sites,” tiny etchings that allow bubbles to form and release upward in a continuous stream. I’ve heard these etchings most commonly referred to as effervescence points. In the marketing writeup for the Enoteca I noticed they called it a “moussier point” (the head of foam on a glass of Champagne is called mousse), but it’s all the same thing.
By giving the gas just a single, targeted place to escape, carbonation stays trapped in the drink longer. Just picture how long it would take an entire subway car full of people to unload if there were only one exit, as opposed to several. The Enoteca has one nucleation etching on the inside of the glass. I couldn’t even see it, but sure enough, once I poured the fizz, a stream emanated from a single spot at the bottom.
That is Champagne bubble perfection. Knowing the tulip shape has a distinct benefit over all others, the Enoteca also lives up to every single one of the practical criteria we were looking for: Schott glasses are made of crystal and the lip is very thin, the bowl and stem smooth. It’s also more resilient than regular glass. The crystal uses titanium instead of lead, which makes the material more durable, as we discovered as part of the research for our wine glass guide.
But the reason I like it above all the others is because it feels so special. I found that height almost directly equated with elegance, though taller wasn’t always better. Glasses as tall as 11 inches were precarious in our tests. The Enoteca is 9.75 inches tall, and that seems to be the sweet spot. I poured several amounts of liquid into it in increasing increments, and it was full to the brim before the situation was untenable.
Even more importantly, it’s lighter than everything. When I first picked it up I almost banged it against the top of the shelf because I anticipated it being three times heavier than it actually was. I put it on a kitchen scale and it weighs less than 4 ounces, and Schott glasses in general are the most lightweight of all the brands I tried. The Crate & Barrel Silhouette glasses are more than 5 ounces. Being lightweight is a great benefit for something you often stand around and hold for a long period of time—the kind of feature you don’t even know you want until you have it.
The criteria for flute greatness is largely subjective. But you can see on Amazon that people love this brand, and people I know in the wine and service industry love it too. Schott’s Pure line and Fortissimo line are also enduring favorites. (I put the flutes from both of these options back on the shelf almost immediately because the openings at the top were way, way too narrow. Comically so on the Pure.)
A note: Make sure you’re getting the Enoteca Champagne Glass and not Champagne Flute glass, which is another product in the series with an almost identical name but completely different shape. The Champagne Flute glass has an elongated shape and is bound to hit your nose.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The Enoteca does what it’s supposed to do with very little compromise. If polished wrong or mishandled, of course it could break. Even fortified glass is still glass. And at $40 per glass, it’s on the pricier end of the spectrum, though not as expensive as high-end offerings. But it’s beautiful, special, and utterly functional. Even the savings the Riedel Vinum glasses had to offer couldn’t convince me to put this glass down.
The runner-up
Riedel Vinum Cuvee Prestige
Also Great
$50 on Amazon
Runner-up
Riedel Vinum Cuvee Prestige
The Riedel Vinum is a high-quality glass made of leaded crystal. It’s heavier than our main pick.
If you can’t get the Enoteca, the Riedel Vinum is a great runner-up. It’s blown from leaded crystal, with an extremely even bowl and stem as well as an effervescence etching. The 8-oz. Vinum did the finest job of preserving carbonation.
However, leaded crystal may not be something you need in a Champagne flute. It improves the quality and clarity of the glass, but it also makes it heavy. And unlike wine glasses, which could possibly benefit from the texture of leaded crystal for aroma enhancement, flutes hardly transmit aromas at all. You would need to put your Champagne in a wine glass if you wanted to focus on aromatic qualities, and you will never detect the difference in bubble preservation between this glass and our top pick. That said, they’re shorter than our pick, only 8.5 in. high, and when I look at the Enoteca and Vinum side by side, it’s almost a letdown. Since the Vinum is made of leaded crystal, it’s heavier.
We know Riedel makes excellent glassware, and if you get these you will not be disappointed. But, like the Ouverture, which we dismissed after testing, they left me wanting more. Despite the Vinum’s lower price and practical qualities, the Schott is the glass I found myself reaching for, not just for sparkling wine, but also for bubbly water, mimosas, and even plain OJ. The Vinum is a great, sturdy glass, and I feel slightly more comfortable washing it because of the additional heft, but it’s a lot less fun than our pick.
The budget pick
Also Great
$8 on Crate & Barrel
Budget option
Crate & Barrel Silhouette
A budget option in a similar shape, best for entertaining larger groups.
If you want to entertain more than one or two people, the Crate & Barrel Silhouette Champagne Glass is an unbeatable $8. It is the same height as our top choice, a very similar shape, and despite being made of glass (as opposed to crystal), I didn’t see a whole lot of craftsmanship problems.
It is significantly less sophisticated than the Enoteca, however. It’s heavier, at 5.15 oz., and the soda-lime glass is much thicker, as is the stem. The foot of the glass has a 2.5-in. diameter, almost a full half-inch smaller than our pick, making it less stable (though I had no stability issues when using it). It will be a little more prone to breakage and there is no effervescence point, so carbonation preservation is a fairly moot point.
Why the experts use wine glasses, not flutes
I spoke at length with David Speer, owner of Ambonnay Champagne bar in Portland. He is was also voted as one of the 10 best sommeliers in the country by Food & Wine in 2013. When it comes to Champagne, this guy knows his stuff.
What does he use to serve Champagne? “The one [glass] I use at my bar where I serve exclusively Champagne and sparkling wine is the Riedel Burgundy stem,” he says. Also according to David, Moët-Hennessy, which encompasses Chandon and Veuve Cliquot, has “switched exclusively to white wine glasses” when they conduct tastings. “They no longer want flutes.” And this article at Forbes quotes current Riedel CEO Maximilian Riedel as saying he drinks “Pinot Noir-based Champagnes from Pinot Noir glasses.”
I also interviewed Belinda Chang, James Beard Award-winning sommelier and full-time Champagne educator for Moët-Hennessey. She said Riedel’s “Grand Cru Burgundy glass is, I think, one of the most beautiful glasses that’s made in the world… we use a similar shape to pour Dom Perignon Vintage Rosé Champagnes into.”
So Dom Perignon, Chandon, Veuve Cliquot, and two of the most accomplished wine and spirits professionals in the country advise drinking Champagne out of a Burgundy glass.
Why exactly? The Guardian has an article detailing some specifics: “The tall thin flute has a very powerful bubble engine… spitting lots of fizz upwards. But there’s so little air space at the top of the glass that flavour is mostly lost to the surroundings. This is fine for young wines, but doesn’t allow complexity to develop… For these complex older Champagnes, use a wide glass that curves back in towards the top…”
So, is that it? Should you never buy a flute? Why are we even writing this guide? Indeed, nice Champagne is best appreciated in a wine glass, but here the parade of caveats begins.
First, what you’re drinking all the time may not technically be Champagne. Champagne is sparkling wine from the region of Champagne in France. It often has smells that other sparkling wines don’t—smells like yeast and toast and strawberry that are delicate and prized. A wine glass helps bring out those aromas, and that’s what our pros are talking about.
A more common and less expensive varietal, one that you can obtain easily from a grocery store or wine distributor, is Prosecco. This is the stuff that crops up at dinner parties and in Champagne cocktails and at friends’ houses. It’s often not as aromatic as Champagne.
Speer mentions, “I find Prosecco is less affected by the glass. Until you’re starting to spend good money on Prosecco—and when I say good money I’d say you’re looking at $25-40 for Prosecco, the real top-tier stuff that you’re not gonna find at Trader Joe’s or wherever for $10. Put it in a white wine glass, put it in a flute, put it in a Burgundy stem, it’s all about the same.”
You’re probably not spending $25+ for a bottle of sparkling all that regularly at your home, though. According to David, this is the sweet spot for price in terms of when you start getting noticeable aromas: “With everything that isn’t Champagne, I would almost put it in a price point category. As soon as you get into that $20-$25 a bottle price range, they all get better in a Burgundy stem. But kind of below that, I find the glassware doesn’t matter as much.”
A flute does serve some purpose—to keep your drink bubbly. But not all bubbles are created equally. The method by which Champagne is made sparkly creates a ton of very tiny, very small bubbles under a lot of pressure. These bubbles are so fine, the film they create on top of the drink even has its own name—mousse.
But this method—methode champenoise—is expensive and time consuming, so a large majority of other sparklers are made using a different method that creates much larger bubbles, under less pressure, which dissipate much faster. These bigger, quickly disappearing bubbles are in a lot of those $25-and-under wines and would most benefit from being served in a glass designed to preserve carbonation, which is indeed a flute.
If you’d like the specifics on how sparkling wine is made, Wikipedia lays out all four methods clearly and in exhausting detail, as does this Arrowhead Wine blog post.
Beyond the mechanics, flutes are inherently special thanks to the cultural expectations that come with them. They lack the technical qualifications required of a wine glass, but honestly, how beautiful and fun are they to hold? To sip from? The point of a celebration is to do things that might be outside the normal realm of practicality, so we can appreciate the use of a flute for this purpose, even if it is not always the best glass to use.
What about coupes?
One fascinating thing about glassware is that what makes a good glass occasionally depends on when you live. NotCot has a very cool article that touches on the evolution of Champagne stemware. It’s currently very in vogue to serve sparkling wine in a coupe, a short glass with a wide brim. As far as our experts are concerned, they’ve unanimously declared them the absolute worst thing to drink Champagne out of, though their shape remains strangely alluring and is great for cocktails.
Speer comments, “Flutes have been the traditional glass for Champagne for a while now, and were originally designed to combat the problem presented by the coupe, which was the Champagne glass you see in all the old movies. Those glasses are horrible for the nose, because you can’t swirl the wine at all, and horrible for the bubbles, ‘cause they’re so wide and shallow the bubbles dissipate really quickly. That being said, they are a lot of fun to drink out of for whatever reason.”
Gouze adds, “I grew up in France my family always had coupes to serve Champagne, but years later and being a little bit more savvy in wine knowledge I realize that it’s definitely not something you would want to use for more precious Champagnes. The problem with the coupes is basically that they get the Champagne to go flat very quickly.”
“I think they’re gorgeous,” agrees Chang. “I think they’re great for classic cocktails. But as quickly as the bubbles dissipate, even in the style of glass that I’m recommending to you—a Sauvignon Blanc glass—it’s even crazier in a coupe; you don’t get anything.”
Scientific American reported on a study that endeavored to see if this was scientifically correct. The conclusion was “that there was a much higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the tall flute than the broad coupe.”
Bubbles and shapes
When we first published this guide, we tested a number of glasses, including our former pick, the Schott Zwiesel Vinao. We set out to answer a few questions about glass traits: Does the shape of the flute influence bubble preservation? Can one of these keep your beverage carbonated longer than the others? This was worth finding out. I chose these glasses for testing specifically because they look so different from each other, and observed how the CO₂ escaped:
Bormioli Rocco Ypsilon Flute
Riedel Vinum Cuvee Prestige Flute
Riedel Ouverture Champagne Glass
Crate & Barrel Edge Sparkling Wine Glass
Schott Zwiesel Vinao Champagne Glass
Left to right, Bormioli, Vinum, Ouverture, Edge, and Vinao.
The Bormioli is what you’d call a trumpet shape. I included the Vinum because the bottom of the bowl is slightly tapered in the middle. The glass in the middle is the Ouverture. The Ouverture Magnum was our top recommendation for wine glasses, so it seemed appropriate to see what it could do here. Notice the bottom of the bowl is very round. Next is the Edge, repping an extreme version of a shouldered or squared-off base. Finally, the Vinao, a slightly more exaggerated tulip than the Vinum. Our new pick, the Enoteca, is even slightly taller than the Vinao on the far right.
The Enoteca is similar to the Vinao we used in our shape test, a tulip but with a broader base.
In addition to shape, we tested to see if glasses with nucleation sites performed better. Though they don’t advertise it as aggressively as Schott does, both Riedels have etchings as well.
Each glass was polished and cleaned with canned air.
I washed the glasses, polished them, and blew each one out with canned air to ensure the insides were spotless (so bubbles wouldn’t form on particles of dust). I filled each glass with two ounces of Prosecco, an easy-to-find, well-loved, and inexpensive varietal. This particular Prosecco was made using the Charmat process. All bottles were chilled to 42 degrees Fahrenheit. I backlit the ever-loving hell out of ‘em, and then I observed the streams.
A close-up look at each bubble stream.
The bubbles in A and D form all over the glass, and in D we’ve even got a couple big fat ones taking form. This might look cool, but is less desirable because it lets the gas escape from everywhere, and you don’t want it escaping in chunks.
Glasses B, C, and E perform a little differently. There are some pinprick streams lining the outsides of the bowls for sure, but there is clearly more organization happening. In C you can see a thick stream emanating from dead center. B and E have the finest streams, B coming from the middle and in E it’s off to the right.
After observing, I spoke with Dr. Leigh Krietsch Boerner, Sweethome’s science editor who has a PhD in chemistry, and she gave me a great suggestion— wait 15 minutes after pouring the sparkling, then toss a Mentos into each glass to accelerate the nucleation process. Basically, whichever glass produces the most fizz is the one that has the most CO₂ remaining, meaning it was able to preserve the carbonation the longest.
I did this experiment twice, the first time after letting each pour dissipate for 15 minutes.
You can see some of the reaction here:
Like a fancypants version of the classic Diet Coke trick.
I then repeated it after letting a new pour dissipate for 30 minutes. The results were practically identical:
Only one can be the foamiest.
The shape of each glass made it very hard to judge which had more foam. And this photo is a decent illustration, but not perfect. The glasses fizzed up at staggered times and for different lengths of times. But after watching my footage and taking some notes, I’d rank them in this order, from least to most effective:
5. The Bormioli (A) had a significantly weaker reaction than any other glass. What you see in this photo is as exciting as it got. That giant head of foam as seen in the .gif is a little misleading… it disappears almost instantly, while the other glasses continue to react for a long time.
4 & 3. A tie between the Ouverture (C) and the Edge (D). The tiny surface area inside glass D makes this a tough call. If I spread the foam out I think it’s very similar to what I got out of C, and both heads dissipated very quickly.
2. To my eye, the Vinao (E) was the second best at preserving carbonation. It didn’t erupt like the Vinum, but it also just refused to stop reacting. It sat there for a long time and kept foaming and foaming and foaming.
1.The Vinum (B) felt like the front runner. It’s a wide glass, yet still created the thickest head of foam, and that foam sat there for a long time—maybe 10 seconds.
Lots of foam means lots of carbonation is left, so from this basic observation I drew the conclusion that the Vinum was the best at preserving bubble. The Vinao performed second best. And a trumpet-shaped glass is your worst bet for keeping that Champagne fizzy.
As an added bonus, after the reaction settled there remained a surprisingly clear illustration of how the shape of each glass dissipated the CO₂:
Observing how bubble streams dissipate in each glass.
It’s absolute chaos inside glass A. It almost looks like someone stuck something in there and swirled the liquid around. But nothing has been moved or shaken—these glasses are just sitting here and have been for almost an hour. To a much lesser but still noticeable degree the bubbles inside the Edge flute are not making a very compact stream, especially when you compare it to the three glasses that have a rounded or tulip-shaped bowl.
After seeing the plumes of bubbles line up in the exact same way in two different experiments, I have to believe that the shape of the bowl has an effect on carbonation. The glasses with the tapered tops and tulip shapes are working overtime to make sure those streams stay where they’re supposed to, and that’s an advantage.
The tulip shape preserves carbonation like a champ.
The competition
The Riedel Ouverture bored me, honestly. We know the Ouverture line is a practical, quality product because of our wine guide. It also handled carbonation very well—it also has an etching inside of it, in the shape of a tiny O dead center of the bottom. You can see the thick flume of bubbles it creates in the photo. But I felt like I was drinking out of a miniature wine glass.
The Crate & Barrel Edge flute is top heavy. And you definitely can’t fit your face in it, though to be fair I knew both of those things from the start. It was just the most extreme flat-bottomed or shouldered flute I could find for testing. But it’s unbalanced, heavy, and fell behind our picks in bubble preservation.
The trumpet-shaped Bormioli Ypsilon wasn’t a contender, either, for all of the same reasons as the Edge. It couldn’t preserve carbonation as well as the others.
Crate & Barrel Vineyard – Very similar in shape to the Vinao and just as tall, but it’s ever so slightly wider at the top, edging it dangerously close to wine glass territory. Also glass.
The Cellar Champagne Flute – A surprise find in Macy’s. Side by side with every other glass on the entire sales floor, it looked the nicest, even nicer than the Waterford crystal. But again, its tall tapered shape gets in the way of your nose.
Spiegelau Vino Vino – This glass is very heavy. And the Schott is taller, more fun to hold, and still the glass I gravitated towards over and over again.
Riedel Veritas Champagne Glass – This was just released and I honestly thought it would be our new top choice, but when it arrived I set it aside. It looks just like a regular wine glass, has no flute appeal.
Bormioli – Bormioli makes our favorite drinking glass, but we know from our wine glass roundup that their wine glasses are heavy and a little thick.
Lenox Tuscany Classics – Also very narrow, which we know is not ideal.
Waterford Marquis Vintage Champagne Flute – Considering the great reviews for this on Amazon, I was surprised at how squat and lackluster it was.
I double-checked for a low-end offering, but these brands were too expensive to be an everyday go-to: Baccarat, Lalique, and Orrefors.
I eliminated the offerings from Kate Spade, Villeroy & Boch, Vera Wang, every Waterford other than the Marquis, every Mikasa except the Stephanie, Reed & Barton, Noritake, Ralph Lauren, Nambé , Ritzenhoff, and Royal Doulton. They’re all high-end decorative offerings and just not what we’re looking for.
Peugeot Esprit 180 – Has a vanishing point bowl.
Stolzle Classic and Revolution flutes – These aren’t as tried and true as the heavyweights we chose.
Spiegelau Festival flute – A sturdy go-to great for entertaining, but without the wow factor of what we wanted for this guide.
Spiegelau Vino Grande, Wine Lovers, Hybrid – Of the other Spiegelau offerings, I chose the Vino Vino flute as the ambassador. It’s of a slightly higher quality than these and had a classic shape.
Mikasa Stephanie Flute – Allegedly this comes in a non-decorative option but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Wine Enthusiast Fusion Infinity – Has a shape that was outperformed in our test.
Iittala Essence – I thought the shape was slightly too modern to be a contender.
The Cru Classic and Forte from Schott Zwiesel are highly regarded by users on Amazon, but the loads of reviews are unhelpful because they’re for every glass in entire collections, including wine glasses. It’s hard to figure out which Champagne glass specifically people liked the most. As they were both more narrow than our choice, I set them aside. The Classico is the wrong shape. The Mondial is stubby.
Zalto – Price.
Rogaska Expert – Extremely tall, very narrow.
Riedel Vivant – The Vivant series is the Riedel line at Target. When I opened the package to look at them they all had small deformities in the bottom of the bowl. It wasn’t the quality I was used to seeing—I definitely didn’t see it on the wine glasses of the same series. I checked every box, and they were all the same, so I passed.
Nachtmann Vivendi and Supreme – Nachtmann was a great find during our wine glass tasting panel, though the glass was really fragile. Without the great advantage of making the wine taste better, I knew they would be too delicate to compete with other models in the Champagne category.
Workhorse brands like Libbey, Luminarc, and IKEA would not be able to compete against the thinner glassware up for consideration in this guide.
Care and maintenance
Unlike wine glasses, running flutes through a dishwasher may not be a great idea because it has the potential to leave behind some soap residue, which can mess with the bubbles.
Handwashing is the way to go. Don’t use soap. Letting some hot water sit at the bottom is usually more than enough to break up any residue. I have also used a skinny foam brush similar to this one and it worked well. The Huffington Post mentions using Alka Seltzer to break up dried wine at the bottom, and that seems time consuming, but legit.
Polishing is a different matter. The minute you try to reach into the flute to try to polish, the likelihood of snapping it increases exponentially. For the small price of a water spot or two the inside, just let it air dry in the rack and polish the rim.
Wrapping it up
Flutes may not be the best option for appreciating complex aromas in Champagne, but they will keep your sparkling wine bubbly longer than a coupe or a wine glass. They’re also super fun to drink from, and commonly accepted as the standard for celebrations. Our favorite is the Schott Zwiesel 1872 Enoteca Champagne Glass because it strikes a balance between elegance and durability, and it keeps the bubbles moving slowly through your drink. Cheers!