I have been wondering lately why most wine is sold in a bottle of 750ml? I assume throughout history it has been stored/served in all kinds of vessels of all kinds of sizes and shapes. I would also think it was not standardized until fairly recently (last century?) when manufacturing could be standardized.
So was 750ml about what an average man drank in France or Italy or Greece each day? Or week? Or was it arbitrary and just caught on?
Any knowledge or speculation would be fun to hear about.
A quick search turned this up: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/564533
Thanks, Eric. That’s an informative discussion you linked to.
I believe you will find that some older California wines were marked at 700 ml.
For what it’s worth, I checked the 54 Ch. Latour and 59 Cos d’Estournel (empty) bottles I have here and they are both marked 75 cl (=750 ml).
Thanks Eric. Very interesting link. You’re much better at this whole interweb than me. I like the theory it was what a glassblowers’ lung was capable of making
Great link. I’ve often heard the tale that 75cl was what the govt considered as a decent amount of wine per person per meal at the beginning of the 20th century (knowing that the wine was probably 10-11% alcohol only). On the other hand I still remember the 1-liter star bottle and it was very much the standard every day wine until the 70s and even early 80s in France. The glassblowers’ theory is fun too.
The 750 ml bottle is a very recent standard.
Glass was used in pre-Roman times by the Egyptians and Phonecians. They’d pour molten glass over a mold to create the container. That’s not an efficient way to produce containers though, especially since clay was easy to work and plentiful. The Romans figured out glassblowing and that was a more efficient manner of producing glass containers than using a mold, so glass started to be used more widely. The early glass containers were still made in the shape of the amphorae however, and they were usually fairly small vessels.
Glass containers remained more costly than clay, difficult to make in large sizes, and they were far more fragile than wood. In addition, it was hard to make them a consistent size and shape and the craft fell into decline until the Renaissance period, when the Venetians and others revived it. Venetian glass was still not ideal because it was very fragile and again, the sizes weren’t consistent. So wine was still stored in wood or clay for the most part.
Although after the 1500s bottles became common throughout Europe, for wine purposes they were used more like we use decanters today than for storage in a shop pending sale. In fact, it was outright illegal to sell wine in bottles for several centuries because things like the punt and bottle shape could trick customers into thinking they were getting more than they really were. Thus, wine was usually sold in barrel or in the same way it had been sold for many centuries - a fixed amount was measured out from a larger container into the purchaser’s container.
Two key developments created the glass bottle for wine. First, a few people in England and elsewhere had started using coal instead of wood to fire their glass ovens. That made a hotter fire and a stronger glass. Second, King James, taking a break from translating the Bible, issued a patent to one of his admirals. They used to issue letters of patent, which essentially gave the person a monopoly. With this letter of patent, James prohibited importation of foreign glass and gave Robert Mansell the sole authority to make glass in England. That move actually backfired and because of that patent letter, laws were finally passed restricting the King’s power to grant patent letters.
Nonetheless, the English pushed the development of glass. With their hotter fires, they also increased the proportion of sand in the glass and their bottles became stronger and darker than any before. The crucial development for wine however, was mechanizing the production. I think the guy’s name was Digby - don’t remember off the top. Anyhow, instead of a person blowing thru a tube, a bellows or mechanical blower was hooked up to a metal pipe, that was then placed into a mold with a lump of molten glass, air blew thru the pipe and the glass expanded to fill the mold and voila - you had the ability to make a consistent bottle and each one was the same shape as the mold.
Most important of all however, was something we take for granted today. With that mechanized mass-production, the bottle had a consistently-sized neck. Once you had that, you could produce a standard stopper and more importantly, you could mass-produce stoppers instead of crafting each one separately. So although people had used cork off and on since the Egyptian times, they also used oil-soaked rags, wax, wood, clay, mud, and all kinds of other things to close the containers, each one “custom” fitted as it were. Once bottle necks were standardized, at least per manufacturer, you could punch out standard-sized corks too. Material science at the time wasn’t able to produce a product that was flexible and waterproof, so cork became the material of choice. And today, when material science is so much better? Hm m m . . .
By the 1700’s, with the mass production of glass bottles and the establishment of cork as a standard stopper, wine could finally be protected from oxygen even though it was not in sealed barrels or amphorae. This meant that entirely new concepts could be introduced – bottle aging, which didn’t exist before, and more fundamentally, bottle-selling. This allowed people to taste more widely too, as they could pick up wine from several places and taste it at their leisure. People like Thomas Jefferson took advantage of this new opportunity, which never existed before. Also, wines that require bottle aging, like Ports, became possible. Ditto Champagne, which didn’t exist until the English bottle makers had developed a thick enough glass to withstand the internal pressure.
Bottles came in many different shapes and sizes. Originally they had bulbous bottoms, the better to stand on a table, but eventually people got beyond that and the “Bordeaux” bottle, for example, was developed for stacking. Over time, certain sizes and shapes became associated with specific wines. For example, the “standard” bottle size for Burgundy and Champagne was around 800ml, while for Tokaj and Beaujolais it was around 500 ml. We see vestiges of the old-time bottles today in the long German wines, the Tokaj bottle, the crook-necked Italian bottles, and others.
The irony is that the “standard” size of today, which has been adopted pretty much world wide, did not come from Europe. In the late 1970s the United States issued a requirement that with few exceptions, bottles had to be 750ml, similar to a “fifth” of whiskey, which Americans already understood and preferred anyway. There was a push to move to the metric system and that size roughly corresponded to the “fifth” that people were used to. Remember, there was not much of a wine industry in the US at the time. The 750 size isn’t exactly a “fifth”, but the idea was to keep things simple and round it off.
The European governments had also asked producers to settle on one size to reduce confusion and since the US had decided on 750 ml, that seemed to be the most sensible route for the Europeans, since they wanted to sell to the US. While they did and do still bottle different sizes, economically it made little sense to produce many different “standard” sizes so as a matter of practicality they adopted the 750 size. Personally, I wish they’d settled on a specific shape too, so I would know how many would really fit into my cellar.
This post is a lot longer than I’d planned. I guess it should have been on the WB blog site but I don’t have the discipline to keep one of those up regularly.
Greg --As usual, your erudition is awesome.
simple.
750cc = perfect for 2 people
but, if you happen to hoard and finish a bottle yourself, it ain’t gonna kill ya.
OK, as to the specific size, I’m not 100 pct certain but the most credible theory has to do with rationing in WW2, when people figured they could get an extra bottle out of each gallon by making them a little bit less than a quart. So they introduced a new size that made no sense in the pint/quart/gallon scheme, but there you are. At some point when I have more time, I’ll track that down. But it parallels the idea of selling TVs by diagonal measure, or shrinking the size of your candy bar or cereal box or package of sugar rather than raising the price.
I don’t think most of the other theories are really credible. People have different lung capacities and as mentioned, when bottles became the vessel of choice, the lung capacity of a man was completely irrelevant because the bottles were machine made. Nor was there really a lot of standardization as to the alcohol content that would lend credence to the idea of bottle size and human capacity. America was a hard-drinking country, but we made mostly corn liquor. The main competitor was rum from the Indies. People weren’t buying so much for the sipping qualities as for the alcohol levels. Nobody really cared about the health effects of more or less alcohol - the temperance movement was based on social behavior, not individual health issues.
Anyway, after Prohibition, wine was treated like any other alcohol, and since we’d come up with the fifth for whiskey and bourbon, it was applied to wine too.
If you’re interested, here’s a site with different antique bottle shapes:
Proving once again that it never hurts to look it up.
Yeah, I checked that out John, but you’re a researcher if anybody is. It’s interesting but don’t you want a little more?
Chateau Grillet had a non-standard bottle (700 ml) until the late 80’s. I bet someone here has one to show us!
One thing I don’t understand re: the use of the fifth as a measure for a bottle of wine is that there’s no clear date when this was introduced (as might well be, since it was probably an evolution). However at some point you mentioned the 70s (trade treaties) and at another WW2 and people selling smaller volumes. However weren’t most of the European bottles before that already 75cl? I don’t see old bottles very often, and the oldest wine I ever tried was a 34 Cheval Blanc, but the bottle looked like a standard 75cl Bordeaux bottle.
A lot of German wines from the 70s and earlier came in 700ml bottles.