A Ruling on Champagne Flutes

I shall now say something unpopular at weddings.

The flute is the wrong glass. It was designed to display bubbles, which it does beautifully, and to concentrate aroma, which it does not do at all. The opening is too narrow to allow the wine to breathe and too narrow to admit your nose, which means everything the champagne has to say about brioche and almond and chalk goes directly to the ceiling.

Serve champagne in a white wine glass. A proper one, with a bowl. The bubbles are marginally less theatrical and the wine is enormously better, and if you have spent real money on a bottle, you have just recovered most of what the flute was stealing.

The coupe, meanwhile, is worse still, and exists purely because it looks magnificent in photographs and in films about people whose lives ended badly.

Keep your flutes. They are lovely. Use them for something with nothing to say.