Champagne Coupe
Wide, shallow Champagne glass; vintage style.
What is Champagne Coupe? Champagne Coupe is a shallow, broad-bowled stemmed glass first created in 1663 by Venetian glassmakers working at a Greenwich glass factory owned by the Duke of Buckingham. Originally called a tazza, the Italian word for cup, it was later rebranded as the champagne coupe during the Victorian era, when it became a fixture of English high society alongside the fashion for pink champagne and its white mousse. With a typical capacity of 180 to 240 ml and a stem that keeps the drinker's hand from warming the chilled liquid, the coupe was the default vessel for sparkling wine across much of the Western world for roughly three centuries. Today it has largely retired from champagne service but enjoys a confident second life as one of the most photogenic cocktail glasses in the bar.
Origin and History
The coupe arrived in 1663 from the workshops of Venetian glassmakers, then the most skilled craftsmen in Europe, who had been recruited to England by the Duke of Buckingham. They produced a saucer-shaped stemmed glass they called a tazza, an everyday Italian word meaning simply cup. Two centuries later, Victorian society adopted it as the proper way to serve champagne, and the name champagne coupe stuck.
From there the glass spread across the Atlantic and back. It was fashionable in France from the eighteenth century until the 1970s, and in the United States it defined the look of celebration from the 1930s through the 1980s. A persistent legend claims the bowl was molded from the breast of Marie Antoinette, or alternatively Madame de Pompadour, Empress Josephine, Madame du Barry, Diane de Poitiers, or even Helen of Troy. None of these stories survives a glance at the calendar: the coupe was born in 1663, and the earliest of those women, Diane de Poitiers, had already been dead for nearly a hundred years. The Marie Antoinette version probably borrows from her real porcelain jattes-tetons, breast-shaped milk bowls made for the Laiterie at Rambouillet.
How It's Used Today
For champagne itself the coupe has fallen out of favor. Its wide, open bowl, so flattering to look at, allows bubbles and aromatics to escape almost as fast as they form, which is exactly the opposite of what a sparkling wine drinker wants. The flute and the tulip, both narrower and taller, have taken over the role of preserving carbonation and concentrating the nose.
Where the coupe genuinely shines now is on the cocktail side of the bar. Drinks served up, such as the daiquiri, the sidecar, and various manhattan variants, suit it perfectly. Compared with the V-shaped martini glass, the coupe's rounded bowl is far more forgiving of an unsteady hand, sloshing rather than spilling. Typically produced in fine glass or lead crystal, and often called simply a coupe in cocktail contexts, it has become shorthand for a well-made drink served cold, clean, and without ice.
