For some reason, the champagne coupe is still popular, even though its saucer-shape dissipates so much of the flavour and bubbles of the wine. Those of you who find yourselves toasting 2005 with a coupe have only a legend to brighten you up: As you bend your head to sip delicately from the unstable saucer, you can reflect that the original coupe is said to have been modelled on the bosom of Marie-Antoinette. (A Sèvres white porcelain coupe based on a cast taken from Marie-Antoinette does exist.)

But behind the designs of the standard champagne bottle and the canonically approved flute glass, there lies much more than legend. Behind the simple trip that your champagne takes from producer to cellar to glass, there is a history intertwined with the distinctive path taken by Western civilisation since the Romans.

For although wine has been known for over 5,000 years, it was the Romans who introduced the glass cup. And although by Roman times glass was known to all civilisations of the time, it was coloured ornamental glass used for beads, toys and jewellery (verroterie) that was treasured. The Romans, who placed glass at the centre of their decorative tastes, developed glass-blowing and hence glass vessels (verrerie).

The Romans also developed clear glass - glass whose light-bending qualities enhanced the favourite Roman drink, wine, when it was poured into a goblet.

Glass vessels are conspicuously absent from the civilisations of India, China and Japan, even during those periods where we know that they possessed full knowledge of the techniques of glass-making. It could be that a widespread pottery tradition in India made glass less valued. China and Japan valued hot drinks (like tea and warm sake), which are better drunk from porcelain.

Islamic civilisation did make useful and exceedingly beautiful glass vessels. But its glass industry was destroyed in two waves of barbarism, first by the Mongols in the 12th and 13th centuries, then by Tamerlane in the 15th. The deportation of glass-makers from Damascus, a great glass centre, and later from Constantinople, led to an influx of skilled artisans to western Europe, whose glasses clinked more merrily.

For it was the quest for the ever more luxurious wine-glass that was a main motive behind the Venetian and Bohemian development of their glass industries. And it was a fragment of a broken Venetian wine-glass that Robert Hooke used, in 1665, to describe the uses of a high-power microscope.

Glass begets glass. Without the microscope, and other glass-based scientific instruments like the thermometer and barometer, the development and enjoyment of champagne since the 18th century would not have been possible.

Today's superb Austrian Riedel champagne flutes would not be able to boast that they are designed to bring the best out of champagne. We would be unable to tell that lead-crystal, having a rougher molecular surface than other kinds of glass, preserves the bubbles better. The champagne might not have been chilled to the right temperature, no more, no less.

And getting the champagne bottle from the cellar might have been an altogether more dangerous business - exposed, as butlers and cellar masters were up till the early 19th century, to the problem of exploding bottles - caused by the great pressure on the bottle (90lbs/square inch) due to the ongoing bubbling fermentation.

The punt (or indentation) in the bottle takes away some of this pressure. But neither that, nor corks nor muzzles were enough. The right amount of pressure needed to be measured.

Other things were needed of course to secure the arrival of your champagne bottle on your table. One of the most important was the industrialisation of bottle-making - away from mouth-blowing - which secured the standardisation of bottle-necks, and hence the neat fit of the cork, and thus the mass production of bottles and international trade.

But even the cheap mass production of glass owes much to those Romans.

So, when you toast to usher in 2005, spare a thought for them, and for those Venetians, Bohemians, and refugees from Damascus and Constantinople; not to mention the refugee glassmakers from Counter-Reformation Europe, who ended up in England, developing the stronger English glass that Dom Pérignon needed, as he struggled, in the late 17th century, to bottle the unruly bubbly wine in the cellars of the Abbey of Hautvillers.

ranierfsadni@europe.com