in wine today

Size does matter

Quick, before you pop that bottle of bubbly at the stroke of midnight.

What’s the difference between a split and a Methuselah?

It’s not, as someone crudely observed, the difference between a very young girl and a very old man, but a difference in bottle sizes. A split is a quarter-bottle that is normally used for Champagne, or that frozen claret they serve on aeroplanes.

Marie-Jeanne is an unusual three-bottle size, which holds one bottle more than a magnum. Some really great wines are often laid down in magnums as they tend to age and develop more slowly in larger bottles.

With names like Jeroboam, Balthazar and Nebuchadnezzar, big wine bottles combine magnitude with mystique. A number of larger Champagne bottles too go by biblical names. Why is not exactly known.

But the name Jeroboam, the founder and first king of Israel, who ruled between 931 and 910 BC, is thought to have been adopted because he is referred to as ‘a man of great worth’. The Champenois followed suit with even bigger bottles in the 1940’s and kept on selecting biblical kings and patriarchs.

The biblical patriarch Methuselah lived up to the age of 96 and easily holds eight glorious bottles. Salmanazar is that handy twelve-size, guaranteed to break the ice at parties.

In such big bottles is the promise of family gatherings, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, reunions and even wakes. Their very size will make any gathering special. If the Freudians among you think that there are subconscious reasons why we treasure our large bottles above all others, I can live with that.

After all, accepted wisdom is that the same wines in puny, ordinary bottles taste better from larger bottles, certainly when poured from a Balthazar – the King of Babylon in 539 BC and equivalent to some odd 12 litres.

If you can still pronounce Nebuchadnezzar, the corresponding to no less than 20 bottles, you need another drink. And, if you’re not macho by nature, you'll need a power tool to pull its cork.

Oh, yes, a normal bottle holds about three-quarters of a litre, although some less expensive wines often come in litre bottles. Thank heavens they do. There’s an alarming tendency for normal-sized bottles to get smaller as we get older and thirstier. Happy New Year!