Bubbles go flat as flutes lose favour

Always shaken never stirred for James Bond - aka Daniel Craig

"Shaken not stirred." How pleased Ian Fleming must have been at completing his depiction of James Bond by the simple device of describing how he liked his dry martini to be prepared.

It is preferences in small things that give us colour and a choice of champagne glass, like the favourite mix of a drink, tells you almost as much about a man, or a woman for that matter, as does a psychometric test.

In the 1960s, the smart thing was to drink champagne from a wide flat glass or "saucer", a shape reputedly inspired by the breasts of Marie Antoinette and used to great effect in that greatest of all television series, The Avengers.

Would Diana Rigg have so stirred the affections of the red blooded Anglo-Saxon male if her lovely eyes had not looked out of the TV screen across the top of a broad shallow glass of champagne? I very much doubt it.

But then, of course, it all went wrong. The wine buffs and the know-it-alls, a large number of them from Islington I am afraid, descended tut-tutting on this remnant of elegance and, with a machine like ditty of, "it loses the bouquet" or "the bubbles will burst too soon" clattering out of their overtoothed mouths, swept away our saucers and insisted we use flutes. "Really darling, it's what the connoisseurs all use, didn't you know?" and all the nasty nosy patronising rest of it. Would no one ever come to overthrow these oppressors?

Now enter, on a white horse, Federico Lleonart, global wine ambassador for the French company Pernod Ricard, a firm which is to drinks what the Rothschilds are to money. Mr Lloenart tells us, or tells Britain's Sunday Telegraph to be exact, that it depends on the champagne. The best ones, those with complexity, depth and autolytic notes that is, are better served from a wider glass which allows the aromas to express themselves (he recommends a white wine glass, but I expect he is letting his customers get used to the idea before taking his theories to their logical conclusions). Cheap champagne on the other hand is best drunk from a flute because any smell is drowned by an uprush of funnelled carbon dioxide.

So there we have it. Good champagne from saucers and bad champagne from flutes (and I may say that the same seems to go for other sparkling whites). Finishing schools can tell their clientele: "Don't worry about the label, just watch which sort of glass it is served from." The pretentious can say: "I am afraid my doctor has forbidden me narrow glass champagnes." Actually I am going out to a drinks party now with people who used to bang on about the superiority of flutes when the flutes were ascendant. Will they offer champagne or a sparkling white? Probably. Will they stick with their flutes? Probably not, the saucer is now high fashion. Will I be able to resist the temptation to say "surely this would taste better in a flute?" Probably not.

Before retiring, John Watson was a partner in an international law firm. He now writes from Islington, London.