The Spirit World

Few glasses present a more iconic representation of the cocktail than does the now ubiquitous “Martini” glass. You know the one, that “V” shaped glass perched firmly atop a slender stem. You see them everywhere, from high-end cocktail lounges to bedraggled dive bars. Every store you go into always seems to sell them amongst the variety of other glassware they might happen to have.

The “V” shaped cocktail glass has become commonly known as a “Martini” glass to pay homage to the drink which so often calls it home. The same also happened to the short and stout rocks glass, which is commonly referred to as an “Old Fashioned” glass. Many people even mistakenly refer to any drink served in this iconic cocktail glass as being a Martini, without realizing that a Martini is a specific cocktail, and not a drink category.

The glass itself is believed to have been formally introduced to society at large at the 1922 Paris Exposition, although I have yet to uncover specific details to this effect. What had cocktails in general, and Martinis in specific, been served in before that time? Then, as now, glassware options were extremely varied, with each manufacturer and even each line from a specific manufacturer, providing different flourishes, and design concepts. Bars would often carry a wide variety of glasses, and would choose different ones based on the drink they were serving, or sometimes the customer they were serving it to.

Today, the form of the cocktail glass has become so engrained in the minds of most customers, that glass manufacturers seem reluctant to stray too far from the stiffly slopped angles. In my mind, this results in glassware that becomes highly predictable, if not boring. Periodically I encounter a glass design which tries to buck the trend a little bit, but more often than not, when I approach a restaurant supply store to order them, I discover they have gone out of production.

It has been noticed however, that as the cocktail resurgence gradually evolves, craft style cocktail lounges are striving more and more to impart some of their personality into the glassware that they use. It is becoming more common for such bars to have their glasses custom made for them by a local glass manufacturer, this allows them to not only have a glass which reflects the specific character they wish to impart upon their customers, but it also allows them to select glasses of just the right size for the drinks they choose to serve.

The average home mixologist however would find it difficult to justify both the expense, as well as the often minimum required order it would take to have glassware custom made for them. This does not however mean that all is lost. A fabulous option for finding unique, inspired, and high quality glassware is to simply visit a local antique store and carefully browse through their offerings. Chances are good that you’ll uncover a wonderful variety of glasses to select from, and who says they all have to match?

For an example, here is just some of the different glasses I picked up on a recent visit to a single antique store, prices ranged from $6 to $12 apiece on average, which is cheaper than I could have picked up a “boring” cocktail glass at many department stores.

Another benefit of shopping at antique stores, is that you can return to an era when cocktails were a more manageable size. Most cocktail glasses from the 40’s and 50’s were in the far more appropriate 5 or 6 ounce size. Today, such sizes are next to impossible to locate, stores like Crate & Barrel feels we want 9 to 12 ounce cocktails. I don’t know about you but that just seems like too much to swallow for me.