Champagne bottle brain-teaser

Somebody asked me this yesterday and it’s killin’ me.

Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Methuselah, Salmanazar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar, Melchior: Yeah, we know who these guys are. We know the size they’re associated with. But whose bright idea was it to use these names? The search engines don’t know. Tom Stevenson doesn’t know. Jancis doesn’t know. Maybe you know?

I’m going to go with Galileo for $300, Dave.

A trip to the OED (dead tree edition in the basement) reveals that Jeroboam (aka Joram) was first used to describe a bottle in 1816 by Scott in “Bl. Dwarf” and that Rehoboam was defined in 1895 in the Brewer’s Dictionary.

Methuselah, Salmanazar, and Balthazar are all defined in the Dictionary of Wine in 1935.

Interestingly, Nebuchadnezzar was first used in reference to a large champagne bottle by Aldous Huxley in a letter written in 1911.

The best/only explanation I could find of all of this are theses snippets in Google Books from a book called “The Story of the Glass Bottle” (p. 72 or 73) by one Edward Meigh published in 1922; there are copies available for sale and U.C.D. has a copy in their stacks.


If anyone lives near UCD and cares to go check the book, do let us know what you find!

A pretty good write-up on this with plenty of detail can be found at the following link: http://www.thisdayinwine.com/images/Big%20wine%20bottle%20history.pdf

A more compact, quick reference sheet is here: Bible Q | How did the Jeroboam wine bottle get its name?

As to the who/why, it seems to be that Jeroboam was chosen by Bordeaux bottlers as a good nickname for a big bottle that related back to the old testament. Folks then wanted to name other bottle sizes that became standard over time and just followed this same logic as if it was a rule. It just kind of fell into place.