A special-occasion wine, it gets left in the cellar when the occasion falls short of a celebration. Sure, Champagne always has a date on New Year's Eve, but the rest of the year it faces being overlooked, left alone like a snobby recluse, assumed to be above it all, too fancy-pants to be invited to a cookout, too hoity-toity to be asked over for sipping on a work-a-day Friday night.

All the fuss about the glasses can't help.

Flutes, slender and delicate, are the only vessels most experts deem worthy of sparkling wines these days. As if being considered "the fancy wine" were not stigma enough, Champagne must deal with being dubbed high maintenance, too.

Bubbles, it seems, are the cause for concern. We must drink our sparkling wines out of flutes because the narrow glasses leave the least amount of the wine's surface exposed to air, thereby extending the effervescence of the drink. That's been the conventional wisdom for as long as I can remember. But in a story we ran recently in this section, Maximilian Riedel, scion of the renowned Austrian glassmaking family, tossed all that out the window. About flutes, he said, "They don't do the wine any good."

He said it was his life's goal to persuade Champagne drinkers to serve their bubbly in glasses designed for the wine the bubbly is made from -- Pinot Noir glasses for Champagne made from Pinot Noir grapes, that sort of thing. I'm not sure if a sales strategy is fueling this opinion, but I'm willing to take Riedel at his word.

I rarely pull out the flutes for a Champagne myself. I prefer saucers, those short-stemmed, wide-bowled glasses that fell out of fashion some time ago.

A few years ago, a friend served me sparkling wine in a saucer, or coupe, on an ordinary Friday evening. The squat glass fit comfortably in my hand, and it afforded the wine a wide surface area that demanded my fervent attention lest I spill it. What was more, that coupe of sparkling wine transported me to an era of black-and-white movie glamour, when saucers were the only way to drink Champagne.

I was Ingrid Bergman, sipping the last of the good stuff with Humphrey Bogart before the Germans marched into Paris. I was Katharine Hepburn bewitching Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in "The Philadelphia Story." I was Bette Davis in "Old Acquaintance," declaring that "There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of Champagne." Between the bubbly and the vintage vessel, I took a brief star turn in a life that seemed more elegant than my own.

After I raved about my friend's Champagne saucers, my mother got me a set of my own. They have perfect wide bowls and stems shaped like glass balls of increasing size stacked on top of each other. Just seeing them in my cupboard makes me smile.

And though I love my Champagne saucers, I've always felt a bit shy about bringing them out for anyone but my closest friends. What would serious wine-drinking guests think of sparkling wine served in the wrong glasses?

So it was with glee that I read Riedel's declaration that flutes do nothing for Champagne. Of course, he doesn't like saucers either, but since I'm not ready to pony up for Riedel glasses to accommodate every kind of wine I drink, I decided to do a little experiment. At issue: Just how bubbly do I need my bubbly to be?

My friend-in-wine-research and I sat down with a bottle of Asti Spumante, a bowl of fresh strawberries, and a flute and a saucer each. After pouring the sparkling wine into each glass, we observed that the flutes did offer the best protection for the effervescence, but that the wine in the saucers retained a decent level of bubbliness, too. We further discovered that the best chance for getting a good sniff of the bubbly was with the saucer -- all that wine interacting with all that air made it easier for our noses to soak in the yeasty scents.

Wine drinkers don't typically focus on the aroma of sparkling wines, at least not the way they focus on the noses of still wines. But being able to smell the bubbly a bit enhanced the taste of it, and that settled it for me. I'll raise my saucer to making up my own mind about how and when to sip Champagne, especially if it can make me feel like a movie star on an ordinary day. Here's looking at you, Max.

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