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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.
Could it just be those are “designer” glasses, that you aren’t supposed fill to the brim.
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Humans weren't 7 times smaller back then. More likely this is a result of mass production, and demand.
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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!
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:
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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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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.
Must we take it there? Politics in this place have already encroached into every discussion, relevant or not.
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Oxidation bad! You're letting the wine degas when you let it 'breath', not oxidize.
You can rush degas reds with vacuum stoppers. Pour out a glass, put in the stopper, pull a vacuum. Shake gently, remove stopper, it will be, more or less, ready.
The real breakthrough has been in testing the grapes in the fields to select ideal harvest time. That's why cheap wine is so much better. 100 years ago, the only consistently good wine came from France. Germany and Italy has some hit and miss, but the rest of the world's wine tasted like Indian wine today (OMFG that shit was terrible, never again. Worse than _bad_ aussie wine, not saying it's all bad BTW.)
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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.
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.
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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.
I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
It is. Wine tends to improve (sometimes significantly) with short-term exposure to oxygen. The more surface area of the wine you expose, the faster those favorable reactions happen. This is the reason for decanters, and, yes, one of the reasons for larger glasses. The increased surface area in the glass also releases more aroma.
To call it "snobbery" seems a bit off -- these are well-recognized scientific principles that hold true for wine at pretty much any price point. If you're going to spend money on wine in the first place, why would you not take reasonable and simple steps to maximize your experience?
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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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.
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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.
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Your spelling is a little pour.
I think another difference is decanting. I remember when I was a kid and my parents had wine it was first decanted, then poured into relatively small glasses. The decanting is when the 'breathing' happened. The problem there is that the decanting process took some time (it seems to me they let it sit about 1/2 hour before drinking), so you want to be sure to decant enough for what you will be drinking. But once decanted, you pretty much have to drink it or throw it out. The larger glasses allow you to skip the decanting by allowing swishing.
Whatever happened to due process??
If you believe someone has committed these crimes...fucking charge them and go to trial, otherwise quit merely accusing and throwing the accused out and to the wolves on nothing more than accusations!!
If you aren't willing to file charges and go to court, then shut the fuck up. Accusations alone should not be enough to have someone lose their lively hood and everything they've worked for.....
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