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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.
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.
Humans weren't 7 times smaller back then. More likely this is a result of mass production, and demand.
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If people had to put up with present day leftists back in the 18th century, certainly they would have consumed far more alcohol.
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.
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I think it may be more due to the ability to make huge amount of this stuff so it is more affordable.
A glass of wine made the traditional way (with the quality of a cheap $10 wine) adjusted for inflation would probably be $225 a bottle. Where with mass production we can make a better quality $25 bottle of wine. So today a bottle of wine isn't a trade-off of a week worth of groceries.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's also somewhat disingenuous to conflate capacity with serving size. Modern red wine glasses, which TFA appeared to be talking about, are generally very wide to allow a large surface area at the top. They are supposed to be filled to their widest point, which is typically around 20% of the way up, and have a larger area that narrows higher up to reduce the risk of spilling.
There's also a lot of fashion involved in glass design. A couple of hundred years ago, only rich people would have drunk wine from a glass (poorer people who drank wine would have usually drunk it watered in a tankard). One big shift comes from the fact that most wine drinkers now poor their own. A hundred or two years ago, the fashion was for very small glasses and servants who would keep them filled. Having small glasses that required frequent refilling allowed you to show off the fact that you could afford a load of servants who could keep the glasses full.
Champagne flutes vary considerably in size even today (the nice crystal ones that I have are about double the capacity of the cheap mass-produced glass ones that I use when I can't be bothered with washing up and want ones that can go in the dishwasher). Its chief competitor, the Champagne coupe (which wikipedia informs me was fashionable from the 1700s to the 1970s) is a monumentally stupid design, with a large top surface area so that the champagne goes flat quickly. This was partly for the same reason: it makes your guests drink quickly so that your servants can poor a lot and you can show off how much champagne you can afford as well as the number of servants you have to pour it.
Sherry glasses have seen a shift in fashion from tiny ones that you filled to near the top, to much larger ones that look like scaled-down red-wine glasses (and are filled to around 20-30% full). Again, the glass size has one up but the serving size hasn't changed much.
A lot changed when glass became cheap to produce. For example, now it's very rare to have a bottle of sparkling wine explode, whereas a hundred and fifty years ago it wasn't too uncommon for a major champagne grower to lose a significant chunk of their inventory to bottle explosions.
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