Best martini glasses

A martini is a small drink. Two and a half ounces of gin, half an ounce of vermouth, and the water that stirring adds puts somewhere around four ounces in the glass. Walk into a homeware store and the V bowls on the shelf hold ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen. That mismatch is the single reason home martinis arrive warm, look mean, or quietly grow into six-ounce drinks nobody planned.

• A wide bowl warms fast. The V shape is the worst geometry on the bar for holding temperature - maximum surface area at the top, where the air is. A four ounce pour spread across a twelve ounce bowl is a thin, broad disc of cold liquid losing heat from every square inch of it.
• An under-filled glass invites a bigger pour. Nobody serves a drink that looks stingy. Buy a bowl twice the size of the drink and within a month you are free-pouring to make it look right, which is how a 2.5 oz martini becomes a 4 oz one.
• Volume is where the spills come from. A V bowl filled near the brim has its mass high and its walls sloping outward. Any glass you cannot carry across a room without concentrating is too full, and a big bowl encourages exactly that.

None of which makes the V bowl a bad glass. It makes it a glass with one hard requirement, which is that the bowl be close to the size of the drink. If you have not settled on the shape yet, coupe vs martini glass is the comparison to read before this page, because the coupe solves the spill problem outright.

These are selections made on published specification, glass composition and proportion - not on test results. We have not timed how fast a martini warms in each of these bowls. How we pick sets out the method and what we never claim.

• Capacity, as the maker publishes it. It is the first filter and the last. Anything over about 10 oz has to justify itself with a specific drink, and a glass whose capacity nobody publishes is not on the list.
• Bowl angle at the lip. A straight-sided open cone is the spill-prone extreme. A bowl that pulls in even slightly at the rim holds the same drink with far more margin for error.
• Rim and foot construction. Stemware dies at the rim and snaps at the stem. Reinforced, beaded and laser-cut edges earn more here than any surface decoration.
• Set size you can actually buy. A pair, a four, a six and a restaurant dozen are four different purchases. We say which each one is, because it changes the decision more than the glass does.
• Dishwasher reality. What the maker and its retailers actually recommend - not what is theoretically survivable.

What we deliberately did not weight: cut patterns, color, gift packaging, and any claim that would require us to have drunk out of all four.

Every other decision on this page is downstream of this table. Find the row that matches the drinks you actually make, then buy within it.

The reasonable position for a home bar: six in the 7 to 9 oz band as the working glasses, and - only if you make the drinks that need it - four at 12 oz for garnish-heavy service. That is the same logic we apply to rocks glasses, where the slightly smaller glass is the one that makes the drink look deliberate.

Published capacities are brim-full figures. A glass sold as 9 oz is a 9 oz glass with the meniscus trembling at the rim, which is not a serving you can carry. Assume the real working volume is about two thirds of the number on the box.

The V bowl spills because of its geometry, not because of your hand. A straight-walled cone has no lip to arrest a wave, so liquid that starts moving travels up the wall and leaves. Three details change how forgiving a given glass is.

• Angle at the rim. Any inward turn in the last half inch - the angled facets on the RIEDEL, the soft radius on the Schott Zwiesel - gives a moving drink somewhere to break against. A perfectly straight cone gives it a ramp.
• Stem length versus bowl width. A long stem under a wide bowl is elegant and tippy. A shorter stem puts your grip closer to the mass, which is why bar glasses tend to have one.
• Base diameter. The foot is the only thing stopping the glass; a narrow foot under a wide bowl is the shape that goes over when somebody sets a bottle down hard on the same tray.

If the walking distance between where you make drinks and where you drink them is more than a few steps, the honest answer is that a V bowl is the wrong glass and you want a coupe. Best coupe glasses covers that side, and Nick and Nora vs coupe covers the third option, which is smaller than both and spills least of all.

A martini glass is the most fragile object in a glassware cupboard: a thin rim, a wide unsupported bowl and a stem, all of which fail in different ways. Material decides which failure you get.

Pressed foodservice glass - the Libbeys here - is thicker, duller under warm light, and considerably harder to kill. Rim and foot get reinforced because restaurants break glasses for a living. Crystal, which is glass with metal oxides in the melt, refracts more light and can be drawn thinner at the lip, and that thinness is the entire sensory difference you are buying. Tritan sits between them: Schott Zwiesel replaces lead with zirconium for brilliance and adds titanium for strength, which produces a crystal rated for repeated dishwasher cycles.

Our position is the same one we take on tall glasses: buy pressed glass by the six for the drinks you make on a Tuesday, and crystal in pairs for the drinks that are the evening. The full material comparison lives on best highball glasses, because the trade-offs are identical and there is no sense writing them twice.

A martini has no ice in it. Everything keeping it cold was done before it reached the glass, which makes the glass itself the largest remaining variable - and a room-temperature V bowl with that much surface area will take the edge off a properly stirred drink in under a minute.

1. Put the glass in the freezer when you decide to make the drink, not when you finish it. Ten minutes is enough; an hour is better.
2. No freezer space: fill the bowl with ice and cold water and leave it while you work, then dump it just before you strain.
3. Stir the drink to temperature in a mixing glass rather than guessing - how to stir a cocktail covers how long that actually takes.
4. Strain through something that holds back ice chips. A julep strainer is the comfortable tool for a stirred drink; see best cocktail strainers.
5. Garnish and carry it immediately. A martini sitting on the counter while you find the olives is a warm martini.

A heavy mixing glass helps here too, because thermal mass works both ways: see best mixing glasses if you are still stirring in a shaker tin.

Two of those rows point off this page on purpose. What glass for a Manhattan makes the case for the smaller bowl, and if you are making Daiquiris or Gimlets at all then the glass is the least of it - fresh juice is, which is what best citrus juicers for cocktails is about.

Six is the number for a household that has people over, and the reason is not six guests. It is that two glasses are in the sink at any moment and that you will break two over five years. A pair is only enough if the pair is the good crystal and something else covers the party.

Martini glasses break in three places and only one of them is your fault. The rim chips in the dishwasher rack where it touches its neighbor. The stem snaps when a hand twists the bowl while the foot is held - which is what happens when you dry one with a towel wrapped around it. And the bowl cracks from thermal shock, usually from hot water hitting a glass straight out of the freezer.

The fixes are dull and they work: load stemware in the back row with nothing touching, dry by holding the bowl rather than twisting it, and let a frozen glass come back to room temperature before it meets hot water. Cocktail glassware types maps where the V bowl sits among the shapes if you are building the cupboard from nothing, and glassware sets for a home bar covers doing it in one purchase.