Stölzle Lausitz

Start with the glass you pour most often. Power is the workhorse series: a wide 52 cl bowl for red wine, a more compact 40 cl for white, plus a 50 cl tumbler and a 24 cl flute in the same design language. Symphony is more generous, with 71 cl and 64 cl for bordeaux and burgundy and 54 cl and 40 cl for the rest of the menu. If you are mainly after red wine glasses, choose above 50 cl, because below that a full-bodied red does not get the room to open up unless you fill the glass to the brim.

For the bar, Kyoto and Revolution are the logical choice, with tumblers of 43, 37 and 32 cl and a 39 cl long drink glass. For sparkling wine the range runs from the narrow Ultra at 19 cl to the wider Symphony at 29 cl. The narrower the champagne flute, the longer the bubbles keep rising; the wider it is, the more aroma you pick up.

Never fill a bowl beyond its widest point. With a 71 cl Symphony that means about 15 cl of wine, which looks like little but leaves exactly enough air to hold the aroma when you swirl the glass. With a 40 cl Power you end up at just under 12 cl. Anyone who sees the bottles empty faster than expected is almost always pouring too generously rather than too often.

The tumblers from Kyoto and Revolution are heavy enough for a single large ice cube, and that is exactly what they were made for. Stir a negroni in a mixing glass and strain it over fresh ice in such a tumbler, so the drink gets cold without watering down within two minutes. For water, soft drinks and long drinks, take the taller sizes from the same series, which you can line up next to other brands under tumbler glasses.

Lead-free crystal glass is clearer and thinner than ordinary soda-lime glass, but it is also more sensitive to limescale. Stölzle Lausitz treats its glass against deposits, so it stays clear after dozens of wash cycles instead of turning dull. That only works if you wash on a short glass programme and rinse straight away with soft water; if a droplet is left standing, the lime marks exactly the spot where the light falls.

Store glasses with the bowl upright and do not let stems touch each other in the rack. Polish with a lint-free cloth and hold the bowl rather than twisting the stem, because that is where it breaks. A wine stopper on the bottle also saves you a second glass to rinse out the next day.

If this is not the brand you are after, the German alternative is close at hand: Schott Zwiesel makes crystal glass with titanium in the mix and sits in a comparable segment, with its own division into series. If instead you want to compare more broadly by shape rather than by brand, all the wine glasses in the shop are gathered in one place, sorted by capacity and grape. And if you are looking for the recipe rather than the glass, for the flutes from this series for instance, the kir royal page gives you the ratio and the right pouring order.