The poet Robert Burns imagined a man toasting his lover with a “pint o’ wine”, and Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous proponent of the pint bottle for champagne. Now, Rishi Sunak’s government has spied a “Brexit opportunity” to legalise the sale of wine by the pint once more – if it can persuade anyone to make the bottles.
Still and sparkling wine will be sold in 200ml, 500ml and 568ml (pint) sizes in 2024, alongside existing measures, under new rules, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) announced on Wednesday. It said the change was made possible by Brexit.
However, the pint-sized move appeared to be the extent of a push towards imperial measures, after a government consultation into allowing more businesses to buy and sell using them resulted in no new action.
Why have laws restricting bottles of wine to specific sizes in the first place? Surely as long as it’s labeled clearly it’s sufficiently easy to know what you’re getting.
And therein lies the issue, how clear is clear?
For example, if someone managed to get hold of bottles with slightly thicker glass, you could sell a bottle of wine with slightly less wine in than is obvious from the outside, increasing the price per mililitre by a few percent. Not much individually, but it all adds up over the year.
If you’re buying that wine, and looking at a shelf of near identical looking shapes and sizes of bottle, you’re already factoring in grape, flavour, price per 750ml, provinence, alcohol content, etc, so what benefit do you get from one bottle being 750ml, and another being 736ml?
Standardisation simplifies manufacturing (of bottles) as well as purchasing of the end product by consumers. There is no benefit to an overly wide selection of sizes.
There are plenty of variable thickness bottles for other kinds of alcohol. It still has to hold 750ml of liquid if that is the volume of the spirit. It would be easier to water things than pass off an incorrect volume.
Yeah, exactly, so volume stays the same and designs can vary. That makes it easier for people to compare because it’s 750ml vs 750ml, instead of both design and volume changing by small amounts.
You can’t tell the internal volume of something based on its external dimensions, other than maximum potential size.
You put the volume on the label, like you already required to do along side the ABV and other markings. That tells you how much liquid is inside - not trying to judge the size of a bottle by how thick the walls are.
This makes no difference to manufacturing really. If it did then all bottles would be the same shape. We can have different shaped bottles for everything already so varying the size makes no practice difference here.
These arguments for standard volumes of bottles are very weak. There might not be any big benefit to different sizes, but there is also not a huge disadvantage either. At best it is mildly simpler to compare things of the same size rather than just at a price per 100ml (regardless of the actual volume). Though you should still have a price per 100ml so you can compare the cost of things at different sizes groups (even for the same product).
A far better argument against this is that it is a pointless stupid waste of time that no one asked for and no one under the age of 50 was even alive to remember wine being sold by the pint. There are far more important things the government can be spending their tax payers money on fighting for.
Just over 50. Can remember it being by the pint(actually fl oz) just. So your age guess is perfect.
But yeah standadization of measurement unit is good. But absolutly no benifit to imperial. Less so now the US trade deal aint gonna happen. But technically even the US is metric legally. All there units are standadised via metric units. And their imperial is diffeeent to english units. As was the whole of europe. That why they changed.
Moving back only makes trade harder world wide.
As for standardised bottles. Even if it was a benifit. It should be a company choice not a law. If all useing the same bottles saves money. Absolutly no reason to use the law to force them to do so.
I am legally blind. So really would be obe of the few people who would benifit from this.
And my view is better lableing. Heck id even support requiring QR codes with info like this and nutritional content. Before bottlesize standardisation.
Actially that would be a huge benifit all told. Being able to use my phone to speak all the details of the product. Including use by dates would be a fantastic advantage to all shoppers.
And also allow multinational supply way cheaper then current system. Still way less restrictive then set size sale. Yet id still question if it should be a law.
Why don’t we apply these rules to all things? Why just milk and booze?
Because liquids are harder to judge just from looking, compared to solids, and the UK has a history - pre weights and measures act - of fuckery.
Cheese, for example, is sold by weight, and back in the day markets would have weigh rooms so you could confirm that the grocer’s scales were correct.
And while the weight and measures act was created to stop “fuckry”
Bottle size and glass size was only applied to alchole not pther liquids.
That was a war thing. Allong with closing times for pubs. Created to limit lunchtime drinking for amunition workers. Standadised glass and bottle size allowed those workers to judge their intake.
Many werr less good with number then today. So a lot of our pre war measurement were based on things people deltwith as a rough estimat. (Acre was the amount a hourse cpuld plough without needing a break.) Stuff loke that.
Also thier already existed a tradition if not law for glass sizes. As land ownees felt controlling poor folks use of alcahole how to help the poor. So pubs often only got the right to open on thoer land based on these 1800 ideals.
All sorts of our history went into the choices at the time. The legal act was just one part.
But most were clearly defined for a te where we did not have to deal with multiple nations using different bersions of the pint etc. As was true in mosr of europe at the time.
Metric was a bloody good idea. And is freaking stupid to reverse now.
I really dont thinl the tories calling for this crap are intouch enough even with theor desired vote.
Im 53. So grew up using both units. But even folks my fathers age do not temd to support thos now. It was there pre war parents that wanted it. And their really are not many of them left voting.
It might have changed, but at one point you could only sell pre-sliced bread in 400g or multiples of that.
The shelf-edge labels are already required to give the price per 100ml or per litre.
That sounds like a case for restricting the thickness of glass bottles rather than restricting the volume of liquid. How would switching to pints make any difference with that? As long as they’re labelled correctly I don’t see much problem.