Glass Stories.
From soju glasses to sake cups, vodka shot glasses to beer mugs — the cultural history behind every drinking vessel, told concisely.
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The Jue — The Bronze Wine Cup Whose Posts Supposedly Poke You in the Eye
A Chinese bronze wine vessel with two posts rising above its spout. The famous story says that if you tilt your head back to drain it, the posts catch your face and stop you drinking too much. But where does that story come from? Soot on the base, a name given by Song-dynasty scholars, and how a wine cup became a word for noble rank.
The Cunca — Why Galicians Drink Red Wine from a Little White Bowl
Order a red in a Galician tavern and it may come not in a glass but in a small white bowl with no handle. This is the cunca, about 125ml. The young, low-alcohol wine that turns violet against the white glaze, the explanations people give for using it, how a poor household's cunca differed from a rich one's, and its cousin across the border, the Portuguese malga.
The Lycurgus Cup — The Roman Glass That Turns Red When You Light It
Lit from the front it is a murky jade green; lit from behind it glows ruby red. The secret of the Lycurgus Cup, a 4th-century Roman glass in the British Museum, was only solved in 1990: gold–silver alloy particles 70 nanometres across, scattered through the glass. Did the Romans know what they were doing, how did they carve it from a 15mm-thick blank, and why was it called back into a 21st-century sensor lab?
The Champagne Coupe — Ninety Years Older Than Marie Antoinette
The wide, shallow champagne glass supposedly moulded on a queen. But the coupe existed ninety years before Marie Antoinette was born. Where the legend came from, what was actually moulded in the shape of a breast, why the flute displaced the coupe — and why the flute itself is now under suspicion.
Navy Rum and Grog — The Ration Poured at Sea
For nearly three centuries the Royal Navy issued a measured ration of rum every day. An order to add water, given in 1740, gave the English language the word grog, and a 71ml measure became the currency of life aboard ship. The story up to 31 July 1970, the day the last one was poured.