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

How full?

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Re:How full?

[denzacar]

This story reminds me how on our high school road trip a friend of mine was only drinking from small glasses, so as not to get drunk.
Or was that me? It's all a bit fuzzy.

I am certain I was the one running through the hotel halls shooting a staple gun and wearing a lampshade on my head.
Which is something you want to be wearing when shooting staples at walls in a cramped space. Those staples will ricochet all around.

Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days

[cyberchondriac]

Humans weren't 7 times smaller back then. More likely this is a result of mass production, and demand.

Glassmaking

[MightyYar]

The summary has it wrong - it was a technological (and tax!) limitation, not an indication of portion size. From the actual study:

Possible causes
Increases in wine glass size over time may reflect changes in several factors including price, technology, societal wealth, and wine appreciation. The “glass excise” tax, levied in 1746, led to the manufacture of smaller glass products.16 This tax was abolished in 1845,17 and in the late 1800s glass production began to shift from more traditional mouth blowing techniques to more automated processes.18 These changes in production reflect our data, which show the smallest wine glasses during the 1700s and no increases in glass size during that period, as the observed increase occurred from the 19th century.

And to emphasize the point, the study says:

We cannot infer that the increase in glass size and the rise in wine consumption in England are causally linked. Nor can we infer that reducing glass size would cut drinking.

Re:Glassmaking

[MightyYar]

1. Regulate your own breathing. Lazy breathing leads to inadequate lung utilization. Think about your breathing and try to use all of your lung. One good strategy is to alternate a single really deep breath with a few very shallow breaths.
2. You are drinking your water all wrong. Atmospheric gasses can leave water over time, creating dead water. Don't drink dead water! Always decant your water (especially factory-produced bottled water!) into a cup, and then pour it back and forth into another cup to properly aerate it.
3. Most people don't get enough acid in their diet, forcing their stomach to work harder. Eat lots of citrus, tomato, and vinegar.
4. People in cold climates rely too much on nutritional vitamin D. This is nothing but factory-produced vitamin D added to your food artificially... yuck! The only natural way to get your daily allowance is to remove as much of your clothing as possible and get out into the mid-day sunshine.
5. During the winter, some people develop a sensitivity to wood-burning smoke. Fire places and fire pits are much more popular in the winter, and people's unaccustomed systems react poorly. To keep your system smoke-ready, eat plenty of smoked fish and barbeque during the warmer months.
6. Bad blood tends to accumulate in your lower extremities. Heavy metals and other toxins collect and need to be distributed so that your organs can filter them from your body. To accomplish this, a simple headstand is sufficient. Every two hours, pause what you are doing and hold a head stand for about 1 minute.
7. Ceramic coffee cups are made from oxides of Aluminum and Silicon, which can cause human health issues. Always use a disposable paper cup.
8. The little "donut" ring on your computer's cords is great for limiting electrical noise through the wire, but the tradeoff is a disturbed electromagnetic energy field. Always tear these little donuts off to improve your electromagnetic environment.
9. The interior air of cars is laden with mold spores and plasticizer vapor - always drive with the windows down, even in winter.
10. Raw or undercooked chicken can indeed contain salmonella, but cooking the chicken straight through denatures critical proteins. A healthy person can handle exposure to salmonella, and regular exposure should make you more resistant. Always under-cook your chicken.

How'd I do?

Re:449ml? Where?!?

[jonnythan]

$12.99 for a 4-pack of 20 oz (591 mL) wine glasses at Target right now. The smallest red wine glass I see there is 12 oz (355 mL).

Virtually all of their white wine glasses are 12 oz (355 mL) or larger. They have a couple of smaller glasses, mostly champagne flutes. The average wine glass I see for sale in Target is 15 oz (443 mL).

Head over to IKEA and their standard white wine glass is 8 oz (237 mL), red wine glass 10 oz (295 mL). Those are the smallest they sell that aren't small novelty glasses. Their range for regular-looking wine glasses is 8 to 20 oz (237 - 591 mL).

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:Humans had a smaller stature in those days

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:0.5l

[vux984]

yup pretty much. we use these at home...

https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-...

It's a 21oz+ glass. (0.6L) But see the picture... that's about how full you full them. You can swirl the wine in them, see the legs, and enjoy the 'bouquet'.

Nobody would ever fill them, even halfway would be pretty absurd.

Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:0.5l

[apoc.famine]

Speak for yourself! The box of wine is all the way in the other room. Filling up that 0.6L glass means I'm sitting down with a fancy $7 glass of wine. That's called being classy, not being a drunk when your wine costs that much by the glass.

Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days

[Anonymous Coward]

Your spelling is a little pour.

Re:0.5l

[SirSlud]

Nobody would ever fill them

I'm curious, hypothetically asking, if you'd never met a lumberjack, would you conclude that it's absurd that they exist? Because people fill glasses like those. You just don't know them.