In the US, all standard liquor and wine bottles used to be "a fifth" -- which meant one-fifth of a gallon.
My handy Google-supplied gallon to liter calculator gives the value of 0.2 gal = 0.7570823568 liter.
I recall back when a bottle of wine in the US measured a "fifth", although it wasn't called that, and then when it changed to .750 liters. I assumed at the time, and still do, that the near-equivalence of these measures made it easy for US bottlers to go to the non-gallon measure, since it was almost the same. And probably this meant that European bottles could just be imported with the standard international measure.
No real idea what the story was in Europe, which had been on liters since around Napoleon's day, so the question of why .750 liters is not necessarily settled by the gallon-bottle standard. But these numbers are not likely to be coincidental.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
The following 2 users say Thank You to bobwest for this post:
Funny answer from @MrTrader and yes, this is certainly true for people from Asia, as most Asians are not wine drinkers as we have been here in Europe for centuries. This has to do with farming as we have done here for a long time and Asian people got much more fast drunk with little amount of wine compare to Europeans.
@bobwest, you are not wrong, but you are not on the right track either.
There's no point teasing us with it, there are not many people hanging on in suspense for it. Well, I am, but probably not many normal people.
If you've got an answer, let's have it. I've wondered about this since, I'm not sure, maybe the 1980's, so I expect it to be good.... Don't disappoint.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
The following user says Thank You to bobwest for this post:
All right, since the urgent question of the wine bottle size has been raised (and not answered), I went to the source of answers, Google. I posed the question "Why is the standard wine bottle size 750 ml".
To save time for anyone who is following this, I will quote the part that most supports what I thought ( ):
I don't believe the "Roman origins" theory, because I don't think that "gallons" were a Roman measurement. Maybe they were, but this sounds like it was sort of made up as an explanation. But they were (and are still today) a US measurement for liquids. If you buy milk in the US, the container is typically a half-gallon. And one-fifth of a gallon is 750 ml.
The European legislation history does sound historically correct, but can we nail this down further to this particular number?. So why did they choose this number?
From the same site, it goes on to say:
OK, so that's either about the lung capacity of the glass blowers or the drinking capacity of the drinkers. Hard to know how to decide between these, and I don't know anything about the lung capacity of glass blowers, but what you could drink before you fall over sounds close to right. Check mark for that one.
There may be other theories. If this brief sampling says anything, there will be many, and no good reason to choose between them except one's personal taste and sense of humor.
Let me add a comment on the "glass blower's lung capacity" theory: again, in the US, a "fifth" was a common standard bottle size for all alcoholic beverages, but one that was (and is) very common for whisky was the quart, or quarter gallon. One quart equals a bit more that a "fifth" (0.25 for a quarter gallon vs. 0.20 gallon for a fifth), but glass makers had to blow them both, and 0.25 gal = 946.353 ml, a bit more, getting close to a liter. (I somewhat think that bigger bottles were blown too, because there was a market for them.) So I am inclined to think that the bottle size had more to do with what would sell than with the lung capacity of the bottle blowers.
------------------
This is a whole lot of words for essentially nothing. But it's what I have. There may be other theories, which is OK by me.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
The following 3 users say Thank You to bobwest for this post:
Yep, this is a huge answer for a little, tiny question. Thanks for your effort and time to do so.
I do not know about all this theories you mentioed here, but I have the following about the topic:
- For centuries, the English imported wine from France (Bordeaux) by ship.
- Their unit of measurement was the "Imperial Gallon", about 4.55 liters.
- So they built barrels with a capacity of 50 gallons = 225 liters = 1 barrique = 300 bottles of 0.75 liters each.
- For an Imperial Gallon, you need 6 bottles of 0.75 liters each.
- Hence the custom of packing bottles in cases of six or twelve. One or two gallons.
- During the discussions in the EU about the filling quantity, the British prevailed with their proposal.
As the topic has to do with wine, following a little, special story:
Man lives to 107 'by only drinking red wine'
A recently-deceased 107-year-old Spanish attributed his long-life to drinking four bottles of wine each day and never drinking water. Antonio Docampo García, who died last week in Vigo, northwestern Spain, said he only imbibed his own homemade red wine.
Mr Docampo would drink two bottles of red wine with his lunch and another two with dinner. "He could drink a liter and a half all at once," his son, Miguel Docampo López told La Voz de Galicia. "When we were both at home we could get through 200 litres of wine a month," he added. "He never drank water."
he added. "He never drank water."