Antique Champagne Glasses between £0 and £0
Stemmed glasses made for sparkling wine, sold in pairs and sets, and split between the wide shallow coupe and the tall narrow flute.
What You're Looking At
Champagne glasses on Sellingantiques are overwhelmingly British, and they arrive in sets. 'Pair' turns up in a good third of titles, sets of six are common, and the runs go all the way to eighteen. Single glasses are the exception rather than the rule, and when one does appear it is usually early.
The dominant form is a Victorian or Edwardian glass with a shallow bowl, cut or etched. Bowls, coupes and saucers together appear in 114 titles against 51 for flutes, so the wide party glass outnumbers the tall one on this site. Victorian is the single most common label in the titles, with Edwardian behind it.
Glasses made specifically for sparkling wine go back to the 18th century, and by the 1800s the trade separated the flute from the wide shallow bowl. Both were made in quantity for table services. The dated field here spans 1700 to 1950, but the bulk sits between about 1850 and 1930. Victorian, Georgian and '19th Century' are broad buckets, not precise dates.
Two smaller strands run alongside. Hollow-stem glasses, where the stem is blown continuous with the bowl, span Victorian to Art Deco and turn up singly and in sets. And there is a tail of 18th-century glasses on pedestal, baluster and twist stems, consistently dated around 1730 to 1780, which come as singles or pairs. A fringe of service pieces, ice buckets, coolers and jugs, sits at the edge of the category and takes up more room in current stock than in the archive.
What Separates Them
Count decides most of it. Pairs and fours sit at the bottom of the range, while sets of twelve, fourteen, sixteen and eighteen cluster at the upper end. A large uniform set is hard to keep together for a century, and the market pays for that. Whether the set is fully matched or harlequin, assembled from glasses that differ, is flagged in the titles for the same reason.
Age works the other way round. The 18th-century glasses, on air twist, opaque twist, pedestal and baluster stems, sit at the top of the range as single glasses, where Victorian pieces at the same money would be a whole set of six.
Decoration and colour lift a set above the plain. Named patterns are called out in titles and are searchable in their own right: star etching and Greek key each appear ten times, with fern, vine, fish, butterfly and convolvulus turning up once apiece. Coloured and cased glass, cranberry, uranium and vaseline, Bristol green, amber and straw opal, is a genuine minority strand and sits in the middle and upper part of the range rather than the bottom.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for champagne glasses between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Champagne glasses have been listed on Sellingantiques since 2011, with over three hundred through the archive since then.
The Antique Champagne Glasses between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Coupe, saucer, bowl
- The wide shallow-bowled champagne glass. Dealers use all three words for much the same shape, and between them they appear in 114 titles.
- Flute
- The tall narrow bowl, named in 51 titles. It was the earlier form, gave way to the coupe as the standard party glass, then came back into favour.
- Hollow stem
- A stem blown hollow and continuous with the bowl, so there is no solid join. Named in 26 titles, spanning Victorian to Art Deco.
- Harlequin set
- A set put together from glasses that differ from one another. A recognised trade form here, named in 17 titles and almost always a set of six.
- Cut versus etched
- Cut means decoration ground into the surface; etched means acid or wheel work. Cut appears in 99 titles, etched in 53 and engraved in 20.
- Pedestal and baluster stem
- Moulded pedestal or swelling baluster stems, found on the earliest glasses in the archive, around 1730 to 1760.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are coupes or flutes more common?
Coupes. Bowls, coupes and saucers together appear in 114 titles on Sellingantiques, against 51 for flutes.
The shallow bowl became the standard party glass through the Victorian and Edwardian years, which is the period the archive is thickest in. Flutes are still a steady strand, roughly one listing in six.
How old are most of these glasses?
The dated field runs from 1700 to 1950, with 211 of 370 listings carrying a clean year. The decade labels cluster in the 1880s, 1900s, 1910s and 1920s.
So the bulk of the material sits between about 1850 and 1930. Labels like Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian are broad buckets rather than firm dates.
What does harlequin mean in a set?
It means the glasses in the set differ from one another rather than matching. Seventeen titles use the word, and almost every one is a set of six.
Dealers flag it because a fully matched set sits at the stronger end of the range. Harlequin sets give you six period glasses with variation between them.
Do 18th-century champagne glasses turn up?
Yes, as a small tail of the category. They come on pedestal, baluster, air twist, opaque twist and mixed twist stems, dated around 1730 to 1780.
Twist stems alone account for 15 titles. These are sold as singles or pairs, not sets, and they sit at the top of the range in that form.
Is coloured antique champagne glass available?
It is, though only in small numbers. Cranberry, uranium and vaseline, Bristol green, amber and straw opal each surface a handful of times across the whole archive.
Coloured and cased pieces tend to sit in the middle and upper part of the range rather than at the bottom.
Why are ice buckets listed under champagne glasses?
The heading takes in champagne service objects as well as the glasses. Buckets, coolers, jugs and decanters all appear.
Each of those words shows up in only nine to eleven titles across the archive, but they take up a noticeably larger share of what is on the shelf now.