Georgia is considered to be the birthplace of wine, they found 8000-year-old wine fermenting pots that our tasteful forebears buried in the ground. The current Georgians are very proud of this ancient tradition.
Wine is not poured out of glass bottles into fragile stemmed crystal. Abandon that image. Wine is fermented on the side of the road in big plastic water jugs, then split into liter Pepsi bottled to be shared around and drunk. It is poured into stubby, thick little glass cups. The Georgians have a tradition of the Tamada, the host of a feast that gives speeches. Someone told me that you wanted your Tamada to be so fat he could rest his glass on his belly. The cups feel comfortable and completely indestructible. They feel designed to be dropped from 10 story construction sites onto concrete without breaking.
These glasses come from the Soviet era. They are known as faceted glass cups, or granyonyi stakan. You will find them all around ex Soviet countries and Eastern Europe. The many straight, faceted sides of the glass provide enormous sturdiness. They were manufactured in the hundreds of millions in the years following WWII, and grew into a ubiquitous cultural symbol of industry, strength, aesthetics, and alcoholism.
I hadn’t thought about these cups in many years. But through my adventures in France working to reformulate plant-based Babybel, we ended up at the factory in Evron, the largest plant for Babybels in the world. Following a tour, they gave us some branded plastic water cups. One each, but I stole some from my colleagues. I ended up using these at a house party as we ran out of glasses, and the short, squat drinking experience immediately took me back to the glass cups of Georgia.
There is something wonderful about drinking from the stakan. They feel indomitable. I realize I never consciously sense the fragility of stemmed cups, but now I know it is always with me. When holding the stakan though, I am at ease. No filling glasses less than halfway up to the wide point. With these, you fill the glass of your friend to the top, and do so with generosity and yet a lack of excess due to their reasonable size.
When you drink from these glasses, there is no pretentiousness, only enjoyment.