Dean Six’s reference book, Viking Glass 1944-1970, says “Prelude Stemware is a complex manner.” He further says that Viking put Prelude on a hand-made, mouth-blown goblet with a pulled lady leg stem and a pressed line with a lady leg shape and a pressed line with a ball stem. He surmises Morgantown Glass made the hand-made, blown stem while Viking made the pressed stems.
The blown stem #4901 has a lovely rippled bowl. (Replacements lists two blown stems with slightly different dimensions. )
The pressed lady leg goblets have smoothly rounded bowls and are thicker with a small disk where the stem meets the bowl.
The #4902 ball stems are easy to spot!
Viking sold ten shapes of #4901 stemware, two sizes of water goblet, tall and low sherbets, cocktail, wine, footed water, juice, cordial, oyster/fruit cocktail and iced tea. This means you could get a complete set of stemware with this pretty pattern and augment it with several sizes and shapes of tumblers. Since Viking put Prelude on a cocktail shaker, wine carafe and pitchers you could serve cocktails before dinner and then use Prelude for wine and water.
Prelude is a lovely pattern and most pieces are reasonably available with some searching.
Next post we’ll look at Prelude dinnerware.