No Wonder a Bottle of Wine Goes So Quickly

Be careful when you ask for “just one more” glass of wine these days.

According to a recent British study, in 1700, the average British wine glass held 66 milliliters of liquid. The wine glasses of 2017, on the other hand, hold a hefty 449 milliliters. That’s nearly a seven-fold increase in the size of a wine glass! The size has been growing steadily, and today’s wine glass is about double what it was 40 years ago.

Not many people fill their wine up to the brim, and it’s possible that some wine-lovers are sipping 1700-era pours of wine from their 2017-era glasses. But past research has shown that on average, large tableware means people consume more as a consequence.

These days, the average British pour of wine is 250 milliliters, “larger than the mean capacity of wine glasses available in the 1980s,” writes Theresa M. Marteau, the director of the Cambridge Behavior and Health Research Unit and study author.

The average bottle of wine if 750 ml, so that means it just takes three glasses to finish off a bottle of wine.

What’s more, 250 ml is about 8.5 ounces. So two glasses of wine is about 17 ounces, or slightly more than three, 5-ounce glasses of wine. For a woman under 180 pounds, that would likely put you over the legal limit of .08 for blood alcohol content (BAC). For a guy, those two glasses of wine would put you over the limit if you weighed less than 140 pounds.

And if you were to have a third glass of wine, for all men and women under 240 pounds, that would out you over the legal BAC.

The problem is that most wine glasses don’t tell you how many mls or ounces there are at various fill levels.

Well, thanks to Periodic Tableware, problem solved. Seems like these glasses should be part of every wine lover’s collection.

And it seems possible that when people say, “I can’t drink wine like I used to”, maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s the glass they are using.