Flat stems and wonky shots

Sommelier and writer Molly Steemson on glassware and what it means

Molly’s sommelier experience extends beyond the wines and into the vessels themselves

On my 18th birthday, my godmother gave me two short-stemmed lead-crystal glasses. They’re small and obviously hand-blown, one contains a few small air-bubbles, the other contains one big one. They do not match. She sent me off to university with them, so I could invite boys over to my room 'for a sherry', which is how I ended many a first and second date.

The godmother in question has her own, extraordinary collection of Georgian lead crystal. She uses these elegant, heavy-stemmed, straight-sided glasses for wine, water and everything else. She gave me my glasses ostensibly as an aid in the art of seduction but she knew, I imagine, that they’d also be the start of a collection of my own.

I bought 70s pastis glasses from a charity shop on Blackstock Road, and wonky little shot glasses on the Greek island Syros. The pastis glasses, I was told, came from an elderly French woman; the shot glasses were made in the 1930s, in the last glass factory in the Cycladies, then buried for safe-keeping during the war. The factory is long-closed, but you can still the remaining glasses from a small shop in Ermoupoli where, one summer, I got mine.

I nurtured my shambly collection. I bought a set of nine small Roemer glasses—the ones with the fat, flared green stem — after a particularly good lunch at Brasserie Zedel: when I ordered a bottle of Alsatian Riesling (to go with our Alsatian Choucroute), our normal wine glasses were removed and replaced with Alsatian Roemers. It was the type of unbelievably charming service point that made Jeremy King an extraordinary restaurateur, the delight in those small details.