Topless Teenagers, Super-Sized Wine Pours - and the Case for the 50cl Bottle
For bars in some countries, 250ml is considered a 'right' option for a glass of wine. Almost everywhere, 750ml is accepted as the right size for a bottle. What if both were wrong?
Over the four and a half decades between 1970 and 2015, between seven and nine million British citizens read a daily newspaper called the Sun and saw nothing untoward in opening it to see a smiling young lady flaunting her naked torso. Today, the idea of any such behaviour by a newspaper publisher would be unthinkable, but it is considered acceptable for an admitted adulterer and four-time-bankrupt who had paid off a porn star, to stand for - and gain - public office - something that would have scandalised most of those Sun readers.
Ten years after the Sun bowed to public pressure and stopped printing those pictures, the daughters and granddaughters of the girls who posed for them now display far more of themselves on OnlyFans, a widely available internet platform, that’s reportedly worth $8bn.
Attitudes change, but not always in a coherent way.
The move to moderation
Wine industry professionals and comedians who used to casually joke about drunkenness and alcoholism now treat that kind of humour in much the same way they, and almost everybody else in polite society, treat images of bare-breasted teenagers. Today, we all espouse moderation.
But we’re in a business that relies on people buying booze. So, along with the brewers and distillers - who are also part of the alcohol-in-moderation chorus - we happily supply our products to pubs, bars and clubs that routinely run ‘Happy Hours’ and ‘Two-For-One’ deals and, in the US and UK in particular, offer wine by the 250ml/8oz glass. How many of the producers of those wines would ever pour a third of a bottle into a Zalto or Riedel for a dinner guest? How many would be happy to see their kids drinking wine in this way?
I am irresistibly reminded of a radio play in which a Sun-loving builder is horrified to discover that the nipples on page three of the morning paper he’s enjoying with his mates over their morning coffee belong to his 18-year-old daughter.
Stop super-sizing
When I suggest that, if we really do believe in moderate consumption, maybe we should be firmly telling the on-service sector that we’d prefer it to offer wine by 125 (4oz), 150 (5oz) or, at most, 175ml (6oz) glass - or by the carafe - and distancing ourselves from Happy Hours. Of course, we’ll do no such thing, if only because the on-trade is having a hard enough time economically these days, as it is, and we’re hardly likely to want to make their lives more difficult - especially as they’re our customers.
Small was beautiful
It is incidentally worth noting that, as 2017 BMJ research in the UK revealed, today’s ‘small’ 125ml glass is much larger than the average vessels from which people would have drunk their wine 300 years ago. In the early 1700s, if you’d filled one to the brim, you’d only have had 66ml, around an 11th of a modern bottle. And the claret you’d have poured would most likely have had an ABV of 10 or 11%, or less.
