14.36.a - The History of the French Wine Bottle: size, naming and more...
In this PAID edition of le Bulletin newsletter I get curious about French wine bottles. Did you know there are 13 bottle sizes? But how did the French 750ml become the international standard?
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1. The History of the French wine bottle: size & naming
Recently while sharing, and enjoying a bottle of Sparkling wine from the Loire Valley with friends, a discussion about the difference between Champagne, a Loire Valley Sparkling Wine, and Crémant.
Then someone asked about the history of the French wine bottle and its size. I’m afraid that I had no idea at the time. Do you? I then wondered about the history of the uniformity of the size of wine bottles internationally.
Some of these bottle names seem exotic, so next I wondered about the history behind the naming.
A standard bottle of wine in France elsewhere is 750 mL or 25 oz, but why?
Why are wine bottles 75 cL?
The standard size of a bottle of wine is 750 mL. But why is this size so common in the wine industry? The answer to this question goes back to the history of wine and tradition, but above all to commercial reasons.
Wine storage in Roman times
In Roman times, wines were stored in amphoras of about 26 litres.
When the Romans conquered France they came across the Bordeaux region, which produced high-quality wine. To transport these wines, the Romans began to use oak barrels that had a capacity of around 900 liters.
Over the years, the oak barrels decreased in size to around 225 litres,
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