RIEDEL

Start with what you drink most often. For a full-bodied red you want a large bowl that gives the wine room: a Cabernet or Merlot bowl in the Vinum range runs up to almost 100 cl, while you pour no more than 15 cl into it. White wine and riesling come into their own in a narrower bowl of around 40 cl, which holds on to the freshness. Pinot noir, by contrast, gets a wide, rounded shape that captures the finer aromas.

Then you choose the range. Veritas is thin-walled and machine-blown, light in the hand and meant for daily use. Performance has a light optic in the bowl that increases the contact surface. Veloce is the slimmer, taller line. If you are after glassware for the bar rather than wine glasses, Drink Specific Glassware is the range designed with a bartender, with rocks, neat, fizz, highball and nick and nora side by side. Everything is lead-free crystal glass.

Pour less than you would think. A bowl of 80 cl is not meant to be filled. You pour 12 to 15 cl into it, so you can swirl without spilling and the aroma gathers in the narrower part above the wine. Hold the glass by the stem, because otherwise your hand warms the wine and leaves fingerprints on exactly the part you look through.

Behind the bar the same principle applies in reverse. The neat glass is small and tulip-shaped because you drink whisky undiluted and the alcohol would otherwise hit too hard. The rocks glass is heavy and low, made for a single large block of ice, and that is exactly what an old fashioned needs. A dry martini is served in the nick and nora, which at 14 or 20 cl is smaller than a classic martini glass and therefore warms up less quickly.

Lead-free crystal glass is clear and thin, but thin also means vulnerable at the point where the stem meets the bowl. Most breakage happens not while drinking but while washing up, when you hold the bowl in your hand and twist the stem. So hold a glass by the bowl and let the stem rest loosely in your other hand.

The machine-blown ranges are dishwasher safe, on a short programme and not too hot. Place them upright in a rack where the stems do not touch each other. Mouth-blown models should be washed by hand in warm water without detergent and polished afterwards with a lint-free cloth. Limescale streaks come off with a splash of vinegar in the rinsing water.

If you do not yet know which grape you pour most often, the overview of all wine glasses is a better place to start, or the red wine glasses if you already want to head that way. The Performance, Veloce and WineWings ranges have their own place in the menu, as do the decanters that made RIEDEL's name. And if you already have the glassware but are missing the tools around it, have a look at the bar tools.