For centuries wine has been served at table out of expensive and often elaborate serving vessels. The unrivalled transparency of lead crystal, invented in late seventeenth-century England, led to glass, rather than silver or ceramics, increasingly being used as the favoured material. Although initially influenced by the contemporary wine bottle, from the middle of the eighteenth century the design of decanters became more subject ot changing fashions.This book traces the developments and changing styles of these most elegant and useful pieces of glass tableware from the mid Georgian period to the Art Deco period of the 1930s.