The First Glögg: 10 Nordic Pieces for Mulled Wine Nights
Glögg season opens the week the clocks go back. Ten Nordic pieces for it: small cups, a glass jug, a pan, a ladle and a plate for ginger thins.
Read More →The Midnight Toast: 10 Nordic Glasses, Coolers and Carafes
Somewhere between the first Advent dinner and the last chime of the year, the glass cabinet starts doing more work than any other shelf in the house. Glasses come out for people who were not expected, go back in slightly cloudy, and come out again a week later. It is the one part of a Nordic home openly built for company, and the stretch from November to New Year's Eve is when it earns its keep.
The ten pieces below cover that whole run: three ways of serving something sparkling, a coupe for anything shaken, a shaker to shake it in, a snaps glass for the short toast, ice and cooling, and the plain glass and water carafe that keep an evening going after midnight. Every one is in stock in the UK, Germany, Norway and Denmark, and every price is worth comparing across the shops on ScandiDeals before you buy.
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1. Holmegaard Perfection champagne glass – Six at once, finally enough
Six glasses, not two. That is the useful thing here: a party of eight stops being a logistical problem. The bowl is a tulip rather than a narrow flute, wide enough at the shoulder for the wine to smell of something, narrow enough at the rim to hold the bubbles. Holmegaard has been blowing glass in Denmark since 1825, and Perfection is its plainest, most repeatable shape. You buy it knowing you can buy six more in three years and they will match.
Holmegaard Perfection champagne glass 23 cl 6 pack Clear
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2. Kähler Hammershøi champagne glass – Tall, quiet, slightly formal
A pair for the table where the glasses are meant to be looked at. The bowl is almost straight-sided and sits high on a long, slender stem carrying the fine ridged detail that runs through the whole Hammershøi range. At twenty-four centilitres it is generous for sparkling wine, which makes it just as good for a dry white once the bottle with the foil is finished. Two to a box also makes this one of the easier things to wrap for somebody else.
Kähler Hammershøi champagne glass 24 cl 2pack Clear
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3. Orrefors More Champagne Boule – The rounded bowl wins
Boule means ball, and that is the whole argument. The bowl swells outwards before closing again at the rim, nearer to a white-wine glass than to a flute. Sparkling wine with some character to it opens up noticeably in that extra room, which a narrow flute never allows. Four to a pack, from a Swedish glassworks with a long record in blown and cut crystal.
Orrefors More Champagne Boule champagne glasses 31 cl 4-pack Clear
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4. Iittala Essence cocktail glass – A coupe, not a flute
This is the proper coupe: a wide, shallow bowl on a fine stem, the glass a martini looks right in and a scoop of sorbet looks even better in. Essence is Iittala's thin-walled family, and the cocktail glass is the piece in it that reads as an occasion rather than a Tuesday. Thirty-one centilitres is a lot of glass, so fill it two-thirds full and let the shape carry the rest. Two to a pack, which is usually the number these evenings need.
Iittala Essence cocktail glass 2-pack 31 cl
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5. Stelton AJ cylinda-line cocktail shaker – Steel, cold, no fuss
A seamless brushed-steel cylinder with a flat lid, from Stelton's Cylinda-Line. It is the opposite of a bar-top gadget: no printed measures, no plastic collar, nothing to go cloudy after a year of washing up. Three-quarters of a litre means two drinks at a time, which is the right pace for a long evening. The steel frosts in your hands as you shake, so you can see a drink is cold without tasting it, and it stands on the counter afterwards like something that lives there.
Stelton AJ cylinda-line cocktail shaker 0.75 l Stainless steel
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6. Orrefors Intermezzo snaps glass – A blue drop underneath
Look at the stem. A single bead of blue glass sits inside the clear, the detail the whole Intermezzo range is built on, and in candlelight it is the only colour on the table. The bowl is a small cone of six centilitres, sized for aquavit beside the Christmas herring and for whatever gets poured at five to midnight. It makes a short drink feel deliberate rather than hurried. Set a few on a tray with a bottle from the freezer and the toast organises itself.
Orrefors Intermezzo snaps glass 6 cl
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7. Stelton AJ cylinda-line ice bucket – Ice that stays ice
Two and a half litres of ice in a steel cylinder, with a close-fitting lid and a swing handle so it can be carried through to the room where everyone actually is. The lid is the part that matters: ice left open on a warm evening is a bowl of water by ten o'clock. Same family as the shaker above, so the two read as a pair on a side table. A serious object for what is, admittedly, a once-or-twice-a-year job.
Stelton AJ cylinda-line ice bucket 2.5 l Stainless steel
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8. Georg Jensen Bernadotte champagne cooler – The bowl for the table
Forty centimetres across, so two bottles and a decent amount of ice fit without a wrestle. It is a mirror-polished steel bowl standing on a fluted foot, from the Danish silversmith house Georg Jensen, and it belongs in the middle of the table rather than on the floor by the door. That changes an evening slightly: people help themselves. Out of season it holds fruit, or nothing. The polish shows fingerprints, which is the cost of a surface that throws candlelight around a room.
Georg Jensen Bernadotte champagne cooler Silver, Ø40 cm
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9. Iittala Kartio carafe – Water, on the table
The one piece here that still gets used in January. The Kartio carafe has a waisted body and a drawn lip that pours without dribbling down the side, in plain clear glass with nothing printed on it. Just under a litre is one trip to the tap for a table of six. Water served in a glass somebody chose, rather than in the plastic bottle it arrived in, is a small thing that makes a long dinner feel looked after.
Iittala Kartio carafe 95 cl clear
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10. Ferm Living Ripple tumbler glass – For everyone not drinking
Smoke-grey glass, ribbed so it catches the light in vertical lines. These are the glasses for the people driving home, the children at the early sitting, and everybody at half past one in the morning. A pair at twenty-five centilitres, short enough to read as a tumbler rather than a water glass, and heavy enough in the hand to feel like part of the evening rather than an apology for not joining in. The ripple hides smudges, too.
Ferm Living Ripple tumbler glass 25 cl 2-pack Smoked Grey
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Final Thoughts
Nothing on this list needs replacing in a few years, which is rather the point of buying glass this way. A champagne glass might be used twenty times a year for forty years, and the shapes that survive that arithmetic are the plain ones: a clear bowl, a stem you can hold, a form that was not designed to be noticed.
So buy one good set rather than three novelty ones, and let the cooler and the carafe do the decorating. If you are adding to a cabinet this month, it is worth checking all four regions before you commit: the same glass can sit at quite different prices in the UK, Germany, Norway and Denmark on any given week. Compare them on ScandiDeals, then pour something cold.
