Most of the year I write about what to serve and drink but during this festive season I’d like to focus on what to serve and drink wine from.

I’ve noticed that wine professionals are much more casual in their approach to entertaining with wine than those who know less about the subject. It is a widespread belief – fostered by those selling wine glasses – that it is essential to have a new glass for each wine, preferably one tailor-made for the precise sort of wine served in it, but this is far from professional wine practice.

In fact, at trade tastings we tend to clasp one increasingly besmirched glass throughout an entire tasting, first using it for dry whites, then pinks, then reds and finally sweet wines. We might – just might – go in search of a new glass for a sweet white if we have been tasting reds, but that is really only for cosmetic purposes so that we can judge the colour accurately. In practice, the effect of traces of the previous wine are so effectively overpowered by the impact of its replacement that it really doesn’t matter if a glass has held more than one wine.