Slashdot Mirror
Wine Glasses Are Seven Times Larger Than They Used To Be (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Our Georgian and Victorian ancestors may have enjoyed a Christmas tipple but -- judging by the size of the glasses they used -- they probably drank less wine than we do today. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the capacity of wine glasses has ballooned nearly seven-fold over the past 300 years, rising most sharply in the last two decades in line with a surge in wine consumption. Wine glasses have swelled in size from an average capacity of 66ml in the early 1700s to 449ml today, the study reveals -- a change that may have encouraged us to drink far more than is healthy. Indeed, a typical wine glass 300 years ago would only have held about a half of today's smallest "official" measure of 125ml.
Bottoms up!
So, might be about the same amount of alcohol to scale?
Modern wine glasses are also seldom filled to the top. But yeah, I have wine glasses from the 1940'ies and they're much smaller than "typical" today.
Boone's Farm Pickle Tink.
Could it just be those are “designer” glasses, that you aren’t supposed fill to the brim.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
That's crazy, I'm in the UK and I've never seen a glass that size outside of a novelty catalog. I'll concede that wine glass sizes have increased (they used to be sold in 125ml measures, nowadays it's usually 175ml or 250ml) but I've never seen a restaurant or pub selling a measure larger than 250ml, and I drink a lot of wine!
449ml is 5.8 times larger than 66ml, not seven times.
I was in Itally recently, and their wine glasses are still pretty small.
I think this is an american thing.
The summary has it wrong - it was a technological (and tax!) limitation, not an indication of portion size. From the actual study:
And to emphasize the point, the study says:
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If people had to put up with present day leftists back in the 18th century, certainly they would have consumed far more alcohol.
...far more expansive.
We've only recently really gotten into the chemistry behind why wine tastes the way it does. The biggest component that's not materials or processes is the "oxidation" it goes through as it's exposed to air. This is "Letting the wine breathe". Larger glasses allow you to swirl the wine around more, exposing more wine to more air. Obviously we're drinking a lot of wine a society, but I feel like the size of the wine glasses is a correlation, not a causation.
Just refill those tiny glasses. Problem solved.
Who used glasses back then? Not any serious drinker. French kissing the bottle was the absolute minimum. Anybody serious bathed directly in the wine barrel head first.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Nonsense, nobody ever fills up a glass and with the "swimming-pool" type ones you only have a thin strip of wine in the bottom. Big glasses are better to develop aromas as all wine geeks will tell you (that's a fact you can check for yourself), so the glassware manufacturers took notice, made them bigger and so even the dollarstore glasses have changed because everybody wants to look cool. There are even glass shapes per grape variety these days, and you'll find wine geeks ascertain they work, although that is very doubtful.
I've been to a couple of wine tastings and there's always a few minutes spent on the variety of wineglasses in use and on display.
A part of wine snobbery seems to be sloshing around the wine in the glass. OK, I know this has some practical purpose if you're way into wine. But it also seems to lead to ever larger glasses as a kind of way of demonstrating you (or some restaurant you're eating in) is super serious about wine.
This seems to me to lead to a wine glass arms race, as everyone gets more eager to make money selling overpriced bottles of wine, they put out ever larger wine glasses to show how serious their wine is. Now we're in this position where the wine glasses are fish bowl in scale. I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
If wine snobbery never became a thing, would we still be drinking out of smaller glasses?
The article cites one reason why this wine glass size increase is less surprising - the practice of letting red wines "breathe". You aren't doing that in a two ounce glass. And is is not a common practice to fill a balloon-bowl wine glass close to the rim, especially with the aforementioned red wines. Looking at examples of properly served wines on-line I see such bowls never more than half full, and often as little as a quarter full.
Then too, consider that this may simply be to a shift in the role of wine as a beverage. Perhaps wine in 1700 was viewed similar to a cordial today, something consumed in small volumes for its flavor, part of social ritual perhaps. They were definitely drinking beers and distilled spirits in many forms back then. So without taking those into account you cannot say anything at all about alcohol consumption.
I posit that wine has emerged recently as a principal beverage at meals, replacing beers, hard ciders or alcoholic punches that were formerly consumed in that role.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
And depending on the form of the glass, the perfume of the wine will have more interest.
Wine bottles have 75 cl of content because a couple of hundred years ago people thought that was the right amount for 1 person to drink with their evening meal.
Back then wine was often fortified and so much stronger than regular wine, hence the smaller glass.
litre of beer is the common size in Germany usa is half of that or less.
I need another drink to deal with this!
Heck.. Just give me a bigger glass next time!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Slow death via auto accidents[1], alcohol poisoning and liver failure.
How else are you going to carefully massacre the bourgeoisie?
[1] yeah, I know. deal with it Maurice.
What non-alcoholic drinks a full 449ml class of wine? My bet is that the glasses are mostly larger for esthetics. The glasses are typically much less than half full when the wine is poured.
Just another day in Paradise
But people are seven times larger than they used to be so they are not getting any drunker.
I'm not impressed unless you can trace it back to the average width of a Roman horse's ass.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As one of my professors told us, you have to volatize your esters...swirl the wine around. I'm betting that that didn't used to be common practice, and thus there was no need for larger glasses.
Just another day in Paradise
My sippy cup is also much bigger today than in the past.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's fine. Probably a lot better for you!
Yeah, back in the old days, EVERYONE used tiny glasses, and NOBODY ever drank to the point of passing out. Consuming excessive amounts of alcohol and passing out is entirely a modern day event, pioneered in 1989 by a frat house (Theta Beta Sigma, I believe) out of Syracuse University.
One liter is not common in Germany.
The normal sizes are 0.4 or 0.5 for a big glass and 0.2 or 0.33 for a small glass. Smalers do exist.
Some beers are served in traditional glasses, which implies 1 liter in Bavaria or 0.2 in Cologne and Duesseldorf.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...back then and wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry.
Marketing basics calls for increased vessel size, like saying, "apply liberally."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Your birth was the result of drunken sex between your mother and a St. Bernard, and it shows in the content of your off-topic comments.
I was under the impression that wine glasses (which by the way are different shapes for use with different varieties of wine) were the size they are to allow space for the 'nose' of the wine poured to develop, and that there was an olfactory component to the experience of drinking wine. Of course if you're talking about bottles of Two Buck Chuck or Night Train, then I guess a disposable red plastic cup is good enough -- if you don't just swill it straight from the bottle, that is.
If you wanna get *really* serious about drinking wine, try this.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Letters from immigrants to Ameica sent back home to Bavaria, Italy, Greece etc were recovered from dusty attics and long forgotten chests. They mention being able to eat meat/chicken every day as an astonishing thing.
Even in America 100 years ago middle class had horses and a few rich people had cars. Now middle class has cars and few rich people own horses!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The most common packaging is 6, 12, 18, or 24 * 16oz bottles or 12 oz cans but if it's sold as a single then it's 40oz bottle or 24oz can. A 6 pack of cans is a little over 2 liters and it would be considered normal for a guy to drink an entire 6 pack over a weekend or a 40oz bottle or 2 * 24oz cans in one evening.
So that's why my glass is half-empty.
Wow, hard-hitting science and technology, fer sher. Milliliters and stuff.
Glasses are designed to aerate the wine in order to improve the flavor as well as the shape holds the aroma in the glass allowing the consumer to smell the wine as they taste it. The size and shape of the glass are important for this and specific wines have specific glasses designed just for them. I firmly believe this is dramatic overkill as I can't tell the differences between the glasses but my sommelier friends might disagree with me.
My name fits again.
I thought that different sized glasses were to help with the bouquet and make the experience better! Not that you should Fill the glass to the top.
But it is difficult to understand where a "single serving" of wine should be filled to.
Super size everything. 20oz beer, 24oz soda, 32oz big gulp.
I looked into this awhile ago because I became concerned around drinking & driving. When I was young the limit was 0.10 the rule of thumb was "one drink per hour" Nice and simple to remember (of course now it's 0.08 and the new math isn't easy to remember). But -- it doesn't matter because the friggen wine glasses are 40 Oz. Even if you fill it to the widest part of the glass - a seemingly obvious measuring line - you still have 2 servings of wine. So "2" glasses of wine is really 4 servings.
From both a health perspective and safety - people can easily consume too much.
Wine makers wanted to sell more wine and make more money.
They couldn't easily convince people to drink more glasses of wine because people know that they shouldn't drink "too much". So, they went to the glass blowers and said, "Hey, lets make a deal. You make wine glasses that are bigger so you have to use more glass and get to charge more for them. People will pour more wine into the larger glasses since no one just fills a glass half full. You'll still sell the same number of glasses and you'll get more for them. I'll get to sell more wine because people will either drink more of it or throw the excess away. We'll even cut you in on some of the profits."
And it works for the restaurants too because they get to charge more for larger drinks even if the customer never finishes the drink.
This looks like a huge extrapolation from a single datum.
My understanding of those large wine glasses are to show off the other, non-drinking qualities of the wine. The empty space in the globe collects the wine's bouquet, allowing you to experience more of the wine's scent as you drink, and the large diameter makes it easy to check the wine's density (tip slightly, return to upright, observe how fast the wine on the side of the glass returns to the pool).
Test by: Take your SO to a nice restaurant, order a bottle, and observe the waiter filling the glass. If he fills it all the way to the top, he's doing it wrong (and you should rethink your choice in restaurants). The glass will be about 1/3 full.
Also test by: In, say, 1930, two people would have one approx 730 ml bottle of wine with dinner. In 2017, two people would have one 730 ml bottle of wine with dinner. The size of the glass does not indicate the amount of wine consumed.
Glasses in which adult beverages are served have changed over the years. Champagne glasses, you may have noticed, generally switched in the latter part of last century from the wide "Marie Antoinette" glasses to the slightly taller, slender tulip glasses. (The reason being, the tulip glasses hold the carbonation longer.) Shall we look at this and make the leap that people are drinking drastically less champagne? Panic!
Of course, your mileage may vary. If you're drinking Badger Mountain from a box while watching Claws, you're probably using a water glass anyway. Or a jelly jar.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hacking the size of our wine glasses. Is there no end to their meddling?
Humans weren't 7 times smaller back then. More likely this is a result of mass production, and demand.
Perhaps 18 - 24 month olds were heavier wine drinkers than we imagined.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In Germany a case of good beer costs under 10 euro (plus bottle deposit) and is 20 half liter bottles. We're horribly overtaxed on alcohol in America. I'm guessing suggesting beer taxes is a good way to not get reelected in Germany. As it should be in the USA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Whomever wrote this piece of garbage for an article has no idea about anything to do with wine.
Wine glasses are not bigger so they can hold more wine. They are bigger so that the same amount of wine can be appreciated in better ways. The larger wine glass is for collecting the bouquet of aromas from the wine so that flavors can be perceived better. The larger volume also allows better examination of the wine's physical qualities such as color and density.
Let's not allow this ignorant fucktard to undo three centuries of improvement in the way we appreciate the art of winemaking.
LOL! They drank straight from the bottle. No foo foo glasses!
What a waste of my tax dollars.
Same goes with all those climate studies.
Here's my glass. What's the problem?
https://www.amazon.com/BigMouth-Inc-Ultimate-Bottle-Glass/dp/B01JMJPNU6?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00BCQ4D9A&th=1
I have some very old wine glasses - from the '30s and '40s as well as my more recent acquisitions. The glass from which I drank a nice Pinot Noir last night was twice as large as the one my beautiful young bride used to drink her Chardonnay. Her glass was one of the older ones.
Go figure! You'd think bars and restaurants would want smaller glasses to sell more.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
If you've ever watched Cougar Town, I drink a full "Big Carl" every day! Two on Saturday! )-hic!-(
Agile Spaceport - You will never find a more wretched hive of scrum and villainy. We must be cautious.
I prefer to drink out of an 800ml glass.
7 times larger = 8 times as large. "Larger" is at best ambiguous. "As large" is clear and unambiguous.
When you fill wine glasses to the widest point on the bowl, which is a good rule of thumb, most wine glasses hold a surprisingly similar amount of wine. That is not 25% full. That is 100% filled to an implied fill line.
In related news, a standard cup of coffee is four ounces. SCAA cupping standard. They brew with 5 ounces, but I'm betting most brewing methods leave close to an ounce behind.
Starbucks used to have a short at eight ounces (two cups). Now their "small" is the old tall (three cups).
* Grande: Four standard cups.
* Venti: Five standard cups.
Plus now the Trenta so that you can nestle 11 ounces of ice into your Venti beverage. Starbucks also tends to have immoderate caffeine extraction rates.
The studies I've read about caffeine show that the optimal caffeine performance boost involves a four ounce shot of normally caffeinated coffee on waking, with another similar (or slightly smaller) shot later in the morning, and then no more caffeine for the rest of the day. After your body gets used to moderation, you won't get a headache if you miss your first coffee the following day. Of course, if you're chasing after a nasty caffeine dependency, the locally "optimal" amount of caffeine follows a hair-of-the-dog trajectory suggestive of the opiod addiction crisis.
The amount of crank that one gets out of coffee does increase with higher doses, but soon the jitters and the state of flattened affect and circular thinking blemish the cognitive surplus, though I suppose winding up in a permanent state of blemished crankhood is hard to detect in the modern millennial who constantly service their social media feed.
Back to wine, that daily drink after work is something that often takes hold in people for whom relaxed is not a possible state. Since alcohol in the evening is known to degrade sleep quality, it's not hard to see how one large glass serves up another.
to drink wine?
That's why Hoover used his famous slogan, "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." These were symbols of prosperity, upward mobility, and a culture and economy open to all.
It didn't work out well for Hoover's political prospects (he was elected but wound up seen as weak and ineffective in the face of the Great Depression). However the symbol endured long after Hoover was a spent force in politics.
http://www.presidentsusa.net/1928slogan.html
Smaller glasses but refilled more frequently. Ancestors kept their wine in the bottle with the top on and only served small amounts to keep the bugs and fleas out due to worse sanitary conditions back then.
This is fake news. We Scots used tankards and wine skins, not these baby wine glasses you refer to.
Hold still while I pour it into your gullet.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That is cheap I think the last time I looked the 12 pack of bottles was like $15 and they are 16.9oz which is .5 liter (no idea if they have gone up). I rarely drink but I still remember getting a case of 24 cans for $4.99 that wasn't anytime this century though we're talking 1980s. I also remember albums, 8 tracks, gas was $.69 when I started driving, and soda fountains where they would squirt the syrup in the glass first then the carbonated water.
We have very good information on EXACTLY how much they drank, so we don't need very indirect info, like the size of wine glasses that have survived.
We have real info from things like George Washington's expense account, the manifests for ships, etc.
That's good German beer too. Becks and better. No American can piss.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When I was a kid, soda normally came in 6 1/2 oz bottles. The only place I even see 12 oz any more is in a few vending machine. I normally see them starting at 32 oz in the convenience stores.
Have gnu, will travel.
Except beer is taxed in Germany. Has been for centuries. The only exception is alcohol free beer. The tax is much lower than on hard liquor, though.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Speaking as someone who's drunk plenty of beers from American macro/micro/nano and European macro/micro:
AmNano > AmMicro > EuroMicro > EuroMacro = AmMacro
And hell, plenty of AmNano/AmMicro is being canned these days, since it's relatively cheaper than glass bottles and easier to store/recycle. Europe hasn't produced anything on the AmMicro level since the early 00s.
Germany makes good mass produced beer using relatively cheap ingredients.
Micro breweries make some good beer (and some awful shit), all using expensive two row barley and the fanciest hops they can put their hands on. Ingredient cost is certainly higher than retail cost for German Lager.
Sure some micro brews are great. Then you have all the near identical brown ales, pumpkin ales (spit) and all the 'beer' that's better called a 'hop smoothy'.
And, as always, the best beer doesn't travel far. Europe also has small breweries. Many don't even bottle their beer. Until you've staggered down the Strasser, you can't know.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because our eyes are getting bigger. People today.
I'm willing to bet the German beer tax is much much lower than the American one and that politicians that want to raise it, find themselves bouncing down the outside stairs of their government building after the next election.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
citation:
http://www.yourweightmatters.o...
I remember the guide showing us small wine glasses with thick bottoms, and describing that the way of drink then was to knock it back like a shot then slam the glass on the table. The act of knocking it back was to compliment the host that this was not some dubious gut-rot that needed to be approached warily, but of such high quality that sniffing the contents was unnecessary.
They got drunk too. They would have blown a .8 to .15.
Keep in mind they were shorter and much lighter even as recently as 1940.
Were wine bottles much smaller?
Did they leave open bottles of port to go bad?
Did the average drinker in the 1800s not drink almost 4x what the average drinker foes today?
This article seems like nonsense to me. The fact is wine glasses were smaller.
But people Still got Drunk.
Sheesh.
Well, the German tax depends on the beer specific gravity, but according to Wikipedia it is on average EUR 0.094 per liter of beer - that would be about $0.40 per gallon, which is, according to here actually higher than in most of the US states. In comparison Germany would rank at #15, together with Oklahoma. In addition, beer in Germany is taxed at the full VAT of 19%, not the reduced 7% food VAT and beer bottles are always deposit bottles (EUR 0.08 for glass bottles, EUR 0.25 for plastic bottles).
And as for politicians, Merkel was elected for several times, despite everything. Her mentor Kohl, the corrupt piece of shit, ruled Germany for 16 years. We Germans are way too patient.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It may partly be to do with what was drunk. In the 18c the British allied with Portugal and left claret, which had of course come from France, for fortified wine, mainly port, from Portugal. You drink a lot less of this because it is stronger. Pope was reproached for having left the room after dinner, with the remark 'gentlemen, I leave you to your wind', when there was only a half bottle left. This was stingy, but at least with port it was halfway possible, whereas with the weaker claret it would have been absurd. One consequence was lead poisoning due to the high lead content of port, and this led to the practice of taking the waters for paralysis. When taking the waters, you went to someplace like Bath, where there were warm springs, lay in the hot water for hours and drank mineral water. People would of course urinate in the water. The weightlessness and drinking of large amounts of water led to mineral loss, and so the lead leached out of the system. It was a known thing that there were two kinds of paralysis, only one of which was helped by 'taking the waters'.
USA has layers and layers of taxation of booze. Federal, state and sometimes local taxes. Some states require that all alcohol be sold via three independent layers (production, wholesale and retail) all of which have to blow a politician regularly to keep their gravy trains going. The really insane states have all booze sold only via state stores, which are not allowed to compete on price, employ useless politician nieces and nephews and open for about 3 hours every second Wednesday.
Bottom line: What you pay 9-10 euro for (10 liters of Beck's, one german case), we pay about $30 (5 American 'six packs').
I will say the made in St Louis Becks is indistinguishable from the German, same as American made Lowenbrau. But you'll also note they don't let the other AB breweries make it. In CA, east bay Budweiser is actually _much_ worse than St Louis Bud, which isn't by any stretch good. Both taste roughly like Alka Seltzer, but the Fairfield bud tastes like Alka Seltzer 'gone bad'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No need to buy a whole new set of wine glasses. Drink straight from the bottle, problem solved.
I have some hand blown wine glasses from the 70s that were actually from a Bistro in France. They hold 4 oz if filled to the brim and 3oz if filled to the proper point for serving. ..... just an Old Fart observation.
Starting in the late 1970s; I started hearing that my glasses were too small for a "serving size" of wine. Where did that come from.... what I found was in the first discussion of how much alcohol is bad for a person and how much has a positive health benefit.
The common though was that two ounces, or equivalent, was the maximum in a day to not have any bad health effects. An ounce shot of whiskey or other distilled spirits or 7 ounces of wine, or 16 ounces of beer contained the equivalent of 1 once of alcohol.
Thus was the "serving size" of wine and beer varied to suit of an equivalence out of a medical study. Wine glasses moved from holding a quarter or third cup to holding a full cup of tipple. Bottled and canned beer migrated from 8-12 oz containers (1940s) to full pints.
Sidebar: a bottle of distilled spirits or wine can be called a "fifth" and was actually 4/5 quart. Or, coming from the other direction, a fifth of a gallon. 4/5th quart, 1/5 U.S. Gallon, is 757ml. Today, most whiskey bottles and wine bottles are 750ml as a standard size... a "metric fifth"?
NRRPT/RCT