31/12/2023
Why the 750ml wine bottle. Thank the English!! Worth reading.
The real reason for this 75cl bottle format is an historical one and a quite surprising one, too. While wine is unquestionably our beloved France’s pride and joy, ironically we owe its unusual bottle capacity to our British neighbours.
This measure was actually chosen in the 19th century by Bordeaux growers and Bordeaux’s British wine merchant houses, at a time when the United Kingdom was the leading importer of French wines.
In those days, while we in France already used the litre unit to measure quantities of liquid, the British used a quite different unit of measure: the gallon, also known as the imperial gallon (1 gallon = 4.54609 litres).
When Bordeaux wines were shipped abroad, they travelled in 50-gallon (225-litre) “tonneaux” or “barriques”.
The conversion of this quantity into bottles proved a headache for wine merchants.
To facilitate these conversions during the purchasing process, a capacity had to be established which could produce a round number of bottles.
Bordeaux’s British wine merchant houses therefore found a unit of measure which allowed them to divide a 225-litre barrel into 300 bottles, which was 75cl.
Since those days, this measure has become the European norm.
If you would also like to know why wine is generally sold in cases of 6 or 12, it is simply because 1 gallon equals 6 bottles and 2 gallons equal 12 bottles.
Our traditional 75cl bottle therefore came about for practical reasons and offered a way of avoiding a great many headaches.
