Raise your glass

Whether you are drinking wine, whisky or champagne, an exquisite antique glass can elevate the experience and it doesn't have to break the bank

- Written by Roger Field

LIKE MANY of you, I suspect, I grew up taking elegant antique drinking glasses and decanters for granted. My parents' finest ones gleamed in a Georgian cabinet and an ancient corner cupboard, as they still do in my home today. It took living in an ill-furbished flat at university for me to realise that there is almost as much of a psychological element about drinking out of fine, antique glass as there is an improvement – or diminution for that matter – in taste. Having failed to make it to an Oxbridge college with a subsidised wine cellar I was faced with drinking cheap student plonk. However, I soon discovered that even plonk is somehow more palatable when drunk out of crystal, rather than Duralex tumblers. So, I was swiftly off to the local antique shops to buy, often at £1 or 50p a pop, lovely old glasses to help me 'civilise' what was otherwise going to be deeply uncouth.

The result? While it would be stretching the definition to call my assemblage of antique crystal a 'collection', I delight in savouring my whisky and rum out of Victorian square-cut tumblers, my port from delicate Georgian port glasses and, come dinner-party time, my old wine glasses and decanters look superb as the candlelight from silver chandeliers reflects off them. Because, of course, if cheap wine is improved by fine glass, decent hooch tastes even better.

It was ever thus. I'll wager that no sooner had the biggest, baddest male in any group of ancient hunter-gatherers bludgeoned his way to the warmest spot beside the fire, he grabbed the 'best' cup to drink out of – be that made of hollowed-out wood or an enemy's scraped-out skull. I jest not here. The earliest recorded drinking vessel is apparently a 'skull cup', cut from the top of a human cranium, found in Gough's Cave in Somerset, dated 12,750BC.

Delicacy and sheer delight