The 4 Best Wine Glasses for 2025

Our conversations with experts helped us determine the ideal features of a wine glass. Here’s what we looked for in our research and testing:

Stem preferred: We primarily focused on stemmed wine glasses, because they offer a better drinking experience than stemless glasses. When you hold a stemless glass, you quickly warm the wine past the optimal drinking temperature. Furthermore, you leave unsightly fingerprints all over the bowl of the glass, especially after touching food.

That said, most of our experts agree that a stemless choice is fine for casual drinking, and we recognize that it’s popular among many people, so we did include a stemless pick in this guide.

Clear glass: We looked for clear, unadorned, and smooth wine glasses, which allow for a view of the liquid inside. We ruled out anything colored, decorative, and made of heavy crystal with patterned etchings. Additionally, we looked for glasses free of imperfections—bends, warps, bubbles, or egregious seams on the stem, which are signs of poor quality and can lead to breakage.

Thin rims: We also ruled out glasses with thick rims and clunky stems, because they feel (and usually are) cheap. After sorting through hundreds of glasses for this guide, it’s clear that the less expensive the glass, the thicker the bowl and the stem become. All our experts were partial to glasses with a thin rim because it felt best against their lips—more elegant and less distracting.

But not too thin: In our tests, the thinnest glasses generally did an excellent job highlighting the flavors and aromas of multiple wines, and most people found them handsome to look at. But in practice, many of our testers remarked that the thinnest stems were difficult to grip and felt poised to break during use.

Even knowing that those thinner glasses are more durable than they appear (all remained intact in our drop tests), most people were nervous using them. Ultimately, the glasses we favored hit a nice middle ground: thin enough to feel elegant but thick enough to feel comfortable.

Medium bowl: The size of the bowl (the part of the glass that holds the wine) affects how well you can swirl the wine and detect its aroma. New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov told us: “You want a bowl that’s big enough to hold a healthy amount of wine while really being no more than a third full. That gives you plenty of room to swirl the wine without fearing you’re going to throw it across the room or onto your shirt.”

We looked for all-purpose glasses from 14 to 19 fluid ounces, which we found big enough to expose red wine to enough oxygen to let aromas become detectable, and still small enough to preserve the subtle aromas of delicate whites.

The right shape: We narrowed our search to wine glasses with a slight tulip shape to the bowl, which showcases the aroma of wines best. Asimov told us, “You want the diameter of the rim to be a little less wide than the widest part of the bowl. That helps to channel aromas upward and makes the aromas of the wine a little bit easier to detect.” We found both rounded and angular tulip-shaped glasses that we liked.

While most wine professionals agree that the wider shape of a wine glass lets the aromatics of a premium bottle of Champagne (think $40 and above) open and develop better than a Champagne flute does, there are situations (like a Champagne toast) that call for the celebratory flutes. The tall, narrow shape of a flute also helps keep your bubbly from going flat too quickly. So for our Champagne glass pick, we looked for shapes that preserved carbonation well, but didn’t close off the aromas of the sparkling wine too much.

To test for the ideal flute shape, we dropped a Mentos into four different Champagne-filled flutes that had been sitting for 15 minutes. The Mentos accelerated the nucleation process and released most of the carbonation that was left—whichever glass produced the most fizz had preserved carbonation the best. Tulip-shaped bowls were the big winner

Long, comfortable stems: We avoided wine glasses that were too short and stubby, because they are less attractive than glasses with longer, more classic stems. The stem also needs to be long enough that you can comfortably hold the glass without your hand touching the bowl, which could warm the wine and leave smudges. But we still wanted the glasses to be short enough to easily fit in a cupboard or the top rack of a dishwasher. We found the ideal height of a wine glass is about 8 to 9 inches.

Balance and weight: We looked for glasses that were well-balanced and didn’t feel wobbly when full of wine. The best had bases that were about the same circumference as the widest part of the bowl.

The overall weight is also important. A glass that feels almost weightless when empty can feel unbalanced when it is full of wine, while an excessively heavy glass is unpleasant to sip from and cumbersome to hold. We looked for options that struck a comfortable balance.

Versatility: Traditionally, wine glasses have been sold on the premise that you need a smaller bowl for white wines and a larger one for reds. But our tests proved that a smaller glass doesn’t enhance white wines for most tasters. Similarly, the biggest reds could be as expressive in a medium-size universal glass as in an XL cabernet model. Plus, there are plenty of complex whites that benefit from intense swirling in a larger glass just as much as a red can.

To test for versatility, we conducted a brand-concealed tasting (most recently with Mary Taylor, a wine importer and distributor who has previously worked as a sommelier). We tasted six vastly different wines in every glass, including $15-to-$20 reds and whites, a $10 red, aged wine, and natural wine.

We also polled a dozen members of Wirecutter staff on how they drink at home and asked them to taste wine from the glasses they were most attracted to, then to score the experience.

Durability: We performed drop tests with all of our finalists: We knocked them over 10 times onto a hardwood surface, both when the glass was empty and filled one-third full with water. We also hit the bowl of the glass against the edge of a granite counter to see how it would fare.

And although it may seem counterintuitive with delicate stemware, all of our picks (and most wine glasses) can go in the dishwasher. In fact, some high-end wine glasses specify that machine washing is preferred. This is because the biggest risk for breaking comes during handwashing, where a glass can slip and hit the sink or snap if you twist the bowl and stem in opposite directions.

But if you must handwash glasses, we recommend cleaning delicate stemware with hot water, a bottle brush, and a little bit of dish soap.

Good value: In general our experts preferred crystal, which tends to be thinner than soda-lime glass. But for the sake of including some less expensive options, we did test some wine glasses made from soda-lime glass in addition to ones made from nonleaded crystal. Ultimately, we found elegant, thin-enough glasses made from both materials. (You can read more about the differences between types of glass in this handy guide from Corning Museum of Glass.)