Winemakers question plan as government champions Brexit ‘freedom’ to allow old-fashioned size
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see what's wrong with allowing imperial measurements tbh. Most places by now are well accustomed to Metric that I don't see businesses suddenly switching to Imperial.
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.
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.
A consultation said the government was looking at the change in order to “capitalise on the benefits of Brexit”, citing the “totemic” metric martyrs court cases against traders who refused to switch to grams and kilograms.
In undercover footage, he was filmed with a pint of pale liquid – identified by some people, almost certainly erroneously, as wine – while appearing to negotiate his fee to advise on transfers.
Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for enterprise, markets and small business, said, apparently seriously, that “our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this, where we can seize new opportunities and provide a real boost to our great British wineries and further growing the economy.
“Instead of fixing the crisis in our NHS, cleaning up our rivers and tackling crime, this Conservative government has been spending its time developing plans to introduce a new bottle of wine size.
The original article contains 921 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Brexit outrage, a poem by a dead Scottish guy, a callback to Churchill, a football reference?
The minor reforms to wine measures are optional.
Buried in the middle as a throw away comment.
I was watching the news on the telly this morning at the same time as reading this article and they spent all of a minute on this story but the guardian has milked it (in pints or millilitres?) for all it can. 😂🥂🍻
The headline implies that these silly measurements are being brought back on a wider scale than what they are and it doesn't mention they're optional until a few paragraphs in. So yes I did want the headline to be more realistic of the situation and less misleading.
So consider why they couldn't have written the headline as:
UK government quietly drops Imperial measurement plan but allows wine and champagne to be sold in pints.
That's pretty close to what the headline was on Sky news on their rolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. But that wouldn't generate the clickbait I suppose.
Like I said, I saw this article and was watching the morning news at the same time and they seemed to imply two completely different stories. But instead the guardian had added it's own spin to the story and headline.