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.

Comments

where's James Burke when you really need him?

[Thud457]

I'm not impressed unless you can trace it back to the average width of a Roman horse's ass.

Re:How full?

[TheRaven64]

Nobody uses glasses that small anymore. I don't know how anyone did in those days. They were like shot glasses.

They had armies of servants to keep them filled. Small was a feature, because it meant it needed refilling more often and so you got to show off the number of servants that you had more visibly. If you had larger glasses then you wouldn't have an excuse for your servants to wander around the room refilling glasses as much and people might not notice that you could afford so many.

The middle classes (who couldn't afford servants, but could afford wine and expensive glasses) used small ones because that's what fashionable people used. This changed when mass production meant that the size of a fashionable glass was set by the more-numerous middle classes.