Best Nick and Nora glasses

A Nick and Nora is a small bell-shaped bowl on a stem: wider at the middle than at the rim. Three consequences follow from that, and all three matter.

• It holds aroma. The mouth is narrower than the bowl, so volatile compounds collect in the headspace instead of dispersing. You get more of the drink's nose with every sip.
• It stays cold. A small bowl means less surface area exposed to the room, and a drink you finish in twenty minutes is still cold at the end.
• You can carry it. The narrow mouth means the surface has somewhere to slosh to without going over the edge. It is the only stemmed cocktail glass you can walk across a room with full.

The cost is capacity. These hold in the region of 5 to 6oz, which is right for a stirred spirit-forward drink and simply too small for a shaken sour with a head on it.

Selections on published specification, bowl geometry and construction rather than on test results. We weighted:

• Mouth-to-bowl ratio. The narrower the mouth relative to the widest point, the more aroma is held and the more spill-resistant the glass is.
• Capacity. 5 to 6oz is the working range. Larger than that and you have a small coupe.
• Stem and foot. A stable foot matters on stemware you are meant to carry.
• Rim thickness. The lip is where you notice the difference between crystal and pressed glass most.
• Set availability. Whether you can realistically own six.

Crystal is glass with metal oxides added, which increases the refractive index - so it sparkles more - and allows a thinner, stronger wall. A crystal rim is noticeably finer on the lip and a crystal bowl rings when you tap it.

Pressed glass is thicker, less brilliant, and considerably harder to damage. In a house with a dishwasher, a tiled floor and people who are two drinks in, that is not a small consideration.

The reasonable position: crystal for the pair you use when the drink matters, pressed glass for the six you use when there are people over. That costs less than either extreme and removes the anxiety from both.

The pattern is simply stirred versus shaken, which is the same line mixing glass vs shaker draws. Stirred drinks are small, cold and aromatic, and this is the glass for them.

The glass takes its name from Nick and Nora Charles, the married couple in The Thin Man, whose films are full of small stemmed cocktail glasses and a great many martinis. The shape belongs to the era immediately after Prohibition, when cocktails came back into public life and the glassware got smaller and more deliberate.

It then largely disappeared for decades, displaced by the wide V-shaped martini glass that became the visual shorthand for a cocktail. The V is more recognizable and worse at almost everything - it spills, it warms fast, and it retains no aroma at all.

The revival is straightforwardly practical rather than nostalgic. Bartenders handing full glasses across a bar got tired of topping up spilled martinis, and the bell shape solves that while also keeping a stirred drink cold. Riedel's Drink Specific line, developed with a working spirits specialist, is a large part of why the shape is widely available again rather than a specialist item.

Fill a Nick and Nora to about three quarters, which usually means the widest point of the bowl. Filled to the rim it loses the headspace that holds the aroma, which is most of why you bought the shape.

That also means the glass sets a portion size. A 5oz bowl filled to three quarters holds roughly a standard stirred drink after dilution, which is a useful discipline - a bigger glass quietly encourages a bigger drink.

Chill it first, like any glass for a drink served up. Ten minutes in a freezer, or filled with ice and water while you stir. How to stir a cocktail covers the rest of the sequence.