Wine Glasses Are Seven Times Larger Than They Used To Be (theguardian.com) 220
An anonymous reader shares a report: Our Georgian and Victorian ancestors may have enjoyed a Christmas tipple but -- judging by the size of the glasses they used -- they probably drank less wine than we do today. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the capacity of wine glasses has ballooned nearly seven-fold over the past 300 years, rising most sharply in the last two decades in line with a surge in wine consumption. Wine glasses have swelled in size from an average capacity of 66ml in the early 1700s to 449ml today, the study reveals -- a change that may have encouraged us to drink far more than is healthy. Indeed, a typical wine glass 300 years ago would only have held about a half of today's smallest "official" measure of 125ml.
How full? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How full? (Score:5, Funny)
This story reminds me how on our high school road trip a friend of mine was only drinking from small glasses, so as not to get drunk.
Or was that me? It's all a bit fuzzy.
I am certain I was the one running through the hotel halls shooting a staple gun and wearing a lampshade on my head.
Which is something you want to be wearing when shooting staples at walls in a cramped space. Those staples will ricochet all around.
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MR CUNNINGHAM
It couldn't be that you had too much to drink, now could it?
RICHIE
Oh that's silly! All we had was some beer in teeny weeny glasses.
MR CUNNINGHAM
How many teeny weeny glasses did you have?
RICHIE (sheepish)
72.
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Re:How full? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody uses glasses that small anymore. I don't know how anyone did in those days. They were like shot glasses.
They had armies of servants to keep them filled. Small was a feature, because it meant it needed refilling more often and so you got to show off the number of servants that you had more visibly. If you had larger glasses then you wouldn't have an excuse for your servants to wander around the room refilling glasses as much and people might not notice that you could afford so many.
The middle classes (who couldn't afford servants, but could afford wine and expensive glasses) used small ones because that's what fashionable people used. This changed when mass production meant that the size of a fashionable glass was set by the more-numerous middle classes.
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/Oblg. My doctor says "I can only have 1 wine glass a day. I can live with that." joke [pinimg.com]
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Didn't they used to say that the perfect breast filled a wine glass?
Could somebody trend average breast size and wine glass size on a line chart and see if they line up?
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0.5l (Score:2)
Could it just be those are “designer” glasses, that you aren’t supposed fill to the brim.
Re:0.5l (Score:5, Informative)
yup pretty much. we use these at home...
https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-... [amazon.com]
It's a 21oz+ glass. (0.6L) But see the picture... that's about how full you full them. You can swirl the wine in them, see the legs, and enjoy the 'bouquet'.
Nobody would ever fill them, even halfway would be pretty absurd.
Re:0.5l (Score:5, Funny)
Speak for yourself! The box of wine is all the way in the other room. Filling up that 0.6L glass means I'm sitting down with a fancy $7 glass of wine. That's called being classy, not being a drunk when your wine costs that much by the glass.
Re:0.5l (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody would ever fill them
I'm curious, hypothetically asking, if you'd never met a lumberjack, would you conclude that it's absurd that they exist? Because people fill glasses like those. You just don't know them.
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"Because people fill glasses like those. You just don't know them."
Or maybe I just don't consider them 'people'. ;)
Seriously, if you want to go full pedant, fine... "Nobody who has the slightest clue how how to use those glasses, and how to behave in polite society, would ever fill them to the top with wine."
Any use of the phrase 'nobody' applied to a 'thing' that is 'physically possible' is going to have some exception for a bunch of fringe idiots who do the 'thing'. That doesn't need to be pointed out, ev
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449ml? Where?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:449ml? Where?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, those glasses are also expected to be filled to a much lower degree. The goal is to have a really large surface area for the wine to mix its aromas with the surrounding air while ensuring that it remains contained within the glass thanks to a taller glass with a narrower opening.
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Re:449ml? Where?!? (Score:5, Informative)
$12.99 for a 4-pack of 20 oz (591 mL) wine glasses at Target right now. The smallest red wine glass I see there is 12 oz (355 mL).
Virtually all of their white wine glasses are 12 oz (355 mL) or larger. They have a couple of smaller glasses, mostly champagne flutes. The average wine glass I see for sale in Target is 15 oz (443 mL).
Head over to IKEA and their standard white wine glass is 8 oz (237 mL), red wine glass 10 oz (295 mL). Those are the smallest they sell that aren't small novelty glasses. Their range for regular-looking wine glasses is 8 to 20 oz (237 - 591 mL).
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That's crazy, I'm in the UK and I've never seen a glass that size outside of a novelty catalog. I'll concede that wine glass sizes have increased (they used to be sold in 125ml measures, nowadays it's usually 175ml or 250ml) but I've never seen a restaurant or pub selling a measure larger than 250ml, and I drink a lot of wine!
As well, this study seems to conclude that people couldn't figure out how to refill their glasses back then. Even with that bit of brilliance, today's wine glasses are pretty specifically designed. different type glasses for different things. We don't often drink Cabernet out of a champagne glass. I suspect that the glasses were the sizes they were because they were the sizes they were, and that refills were easy to procure.
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Re: 449ml? Where?!? (Score:2)
In the UK, a standard spirit measure is 25ml, in Ireland it's 35ml, so my dad's joke about protestant being stingy* had a ring of truth to it!
He jokes about small serving being a "Protestant helping". He being Anglican in a predominantly Catholic country.
Wrong (Score:2, Informative)
I was in Itally recently, and their wine glasses are still pretty small.
I think this is an american thing.
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I think this is an american thing.
False, otherwise it would have been reported in oz (ounces). Really the glass just grew to match the ego of a wine snob.
-"Buttery with an undertone of charcoal."
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Glassmaking (Score:5, Informative)
The summary has it wrong - it was a technological (and tax!) limitation, not an indication of portion size. From the actual study:
And to emphasize the point, the study says:
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where's James Burke when you really need him? (Score:5, Interesting)
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WoW, Super Article!
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Snopes provides a more critical take on that article: https://www.snopes.com/history... [snopes.com]
'“Very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical”? One out of five, maybe.'
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In French/Spanish Colonial Louisiana. Your home was taxed on the number of doorways in the home. The larger the home the more rooms and doors needed. Closets were never built into homes as it counted and taxed as a room. So they had a furniture called Chiffarobe, Wardrobe, Chiffonier and Armoire to store clothes.
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Stop with all this rational thinking and study reading right this minute! We need to get eyeballs not facts, now drop and give me 10 health tricks your doctor doesn't want you to know.
Re:Glassmaking (Score:5, Funny)
1. Regulate your own breathing. Lazy breathing leads to inadequate lung utilization. Think about your breathing and try to use all of your lung. One good strategy is to alternate a single really deep breath with a few very shallow breaths.
2. You are drinking your water all wrong. Atmospheric gasses can leave water over time, creating dead water. Don't drink dead water! Always decant your water (especially factory-produced bottled water!) into a cup, and then pour it back and forth into another cup to properly aerate it.
3. Most people don't get enough acid in their diet, forcing their stomach to work harder. Eat lots of citrus, tomato, and vinegar.
4. People in cold climates rely too much on nutritional vitamin D. This is nothing but factory-produced vitamin D added to your food artificially... yuck! The only natural way to get your daily allowance is to remove as much of your clothing as possible and get out into the mid-day sunshine.
5. During the winter, some people develop a sensitivity to wood-burning smoke. Fire places and fire pits are much more popular in the winter, and people's unaccustomed systems react poorly. To keep your system smoke-ready, eat plenty of smoked fish and barbeque during the warmer months.
6. Bad blood tends to accumulate in your lower extremities. Heavy metals and other toxins collect and need to be distributed so that your organs can filter them from your body. To accomplish this, a simple headstand is sufficient. Every two hours, pause what you are doing and hold a head stand for about 1 minute.
7. Ceramic coffee cups are made from oxides of Aluminum and Silicon, which can cause human health issues. Always use a disposable paper cup.
8. The little "donut" ring on your computer's cords is great for limiting electrical noise through the wire, but the tradeoff is a disturbed electromagnetic energy field. Always tear these little donuts off to improve your electromagnetic environment.
9. The interior air of cars is laden with mold spores and plasticizer vapor - always drive with the windows down, even in winter.
10. Raw or undercooked chicken can indeed contain salmonella, but cooking the chicken straight through denatures critical proteins. A healthy person can handle exposure to salmonella, and regular exposure should make you more resistant. Always under-cook your chicken.
How'd I do?
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Nor can we infer that reducing glass size would cut drinking.
Heh - here's your legally approved thimble size glass of wine sir.
Screw that - gimme the bottle!
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Yeah, it sounds to me like both wine and glassmaking have become more affordable and more accessible. Cheap packs of a dozen 12oz glasses for a buck a piece were simply not available in the 1940s (or even 20 years ago). I don't think there was anything approaching the quality/price ratio of "two-buck Chuck", either - and in any event, wine was simply not as fashionable back then among the general populace.
Now, glasses... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who used glasses back then? Not any serious drinker. French kissing the bottle was the absolute minimum. Anybody serious bathed directly in the wine barrel head first.
Aromas (Score:2)
Today's wine glasses about snob appeal? (Score:2)
I've been to a couple of wine tastings and there's always a few minutes spent on the variety of wineglasses in use and on display.
A part of wine snobbery seems to be sloshing around the wine in the glass. OK, I know this has some practical purpose if you're way into wine. But it also seems to lead to ever larger glasses as a kind of way of demonstrating you (or some restaurant you're eating in) is super serious about wine.
This seems to me to lead to a wine glass arms race, as everyone gets more eager to m
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If wine snobbery never became a thing, would we still be drinking out of smaller glasses?
Oh yeah, there are wine snobs. They are the adult beverage analogy of audiophiles.
That being said, there are some differences in the wine types that do lend themselves to different type glasses. Some glasses taper in at the top to let you catch the smell, some are more open, like champagne. Personally, I think that's a good thing, since the bubbles are fun popping all over, besides, the worst part of champagne is the smell.
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I'm guess I'm well aware of the practical rationale for the various wine glasses (nose, aeration, etc etc).
The funny thing is, if you're ever around an old-world wine drinker, they often just use a juice glass. My sense is that for 99% of the population for most of history, wine was just a beverage, not something with a huge amount of snobbery associated with it.
The Romans regularly diluted it with water to make it less alcoholic, something that would make your ordinary wine snob have a stroke.
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That was about the quality of their water. The wine they drank back then would give a wine snob a stroke.
A few years ago, makers of cheap frog wine threatened to 'go on strike' because box wine was putting small makers of 'vin ordinaire' out of business. Gallo and the rest of the world, had gotten their act together. Cheap frog wine still averaged 3 flies per bottle in the sediment. The french really don't get the whole 'striking' thing. Owners of small business can't go on strike to force their customer
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Oh, it goes beyond striking into active destruction of imported wine [theguardian.com].
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I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
It is. Wine tends to improve (sometimes significantly) with short-term exposure to oxygen. The more surface area of the wine you expose, the faster those favorable reactions happen. This is the reason for decanters, and, yes, one of the reasons for larger glasses. The increased surface area in the glass also releases more aroma.
To call it "snobbery" seems a bit off -- these are well-recognized scientific principles that hold true for wine at pretty much any price point. If you're going to spend money o
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Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
I went to a real wine tasting once put on by someone from a winery and I was pretty impressed with what they knew and the whole process, so I know it's real.
But my guess is overall it's no different than Slashdot -- people "know" the real reasons for CPU cooling and certain aspects of hardware for computing performance, but most of them figure the more LE
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Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
Oh, there are plenty of pretentious thirty thousandaires out there drinking subpar wines with famous big-box labels out of fancy glasses just because that's what they're s'posed to do, don't get me wrong. But they do the same thing with food, clothes, houses, cars, and any other normal life experience they can twist into a status symbol.
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"A part of wine snobbery seems to be sloshing around the wine in the glass."
The purpose of something like wine to anyone one not just looking to get sloshed themselves is to "enjoy the wine".
The larger glasses have several real purposes. The idea that larger glasses make the wine taste better is real. The exposure to oxygen makes a big difference. And letting the aromas gather in the glass makes a big difference... most of taste is really smell after all.
Sure, the idea that you need a different shape glass
Wine Does Not Equal Alcohol Consumption (Score:2)
The article cites one reason why this wine glass size increase is less surprising - the practice of letting red wines "breathe". You aren't doing that in a two ounce glass. And is is not a common practice to fill a balloon-bowl wine glass close to the rim, especially with the aforementioned red wines. Looking at examples of properly served wines on-line I see such bowls never more than half full, and often as little as a quarter full.
Then too, consider that this may simply be to a shift in the role of wine
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Then too, consider that this may simply be to a shift in the role of wine as a beverage. Perhaps wine in 1700 was viewed similar to a cordial today, something consumed in small volumes for its flavor, part of social ritual perhaps.
Don't forget that the less alcoholic beverages were often used as a substitute for water, given that many water supplies were pretty skanky. Beer probably more often, but weak wines wer also a good water substitute.
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>Looking at examples of properly served wines on-line I see such bowls never more than half full, and often as little as a quarter full.
As a (mostly) non-drinker who occasionally pours for others... I just learned I've been over-serving.
Never had a complaint, though.
Re:Wine Does Not Equal Alcohol Consumption (Score:4, Informative)
I think another difference is decanting. I remember when I was a kid and my parents had wine it was first decanted, then poured into relatively small glasses. The decanting is when the 'breathing' happened. The problem there is that the decanting process took some time (it seems to me they let it sit about 1/2 hour before drinking), so you want to be sure to decant enough for what you will be drinking. But once decanted, you pretty much have to drink it or throw it out. The larger glasses allow you to skip the decanting by allowing swishing.
tag-team tumblers (Score:2)
When you fill wine glasses to the widest point on the bowl, which is a good rule of thumb, most wine glasses hold a surprisingly similar amount of wine. That is not 25% full. That is 100% filled to an implied fill line.
In related news, a standard cup of coffee is four ounces. SCAA cupping standard. [scaa.org] They brew with 5 ounces, but I'm betting most brewing methods leave close to
Bull (Score:2)
Wine bottles have 75 cl of content because a couple of hundred years ago people thought that was the right amount for 1 person to drink with their evening meal.
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If it was one person, it was not "their" meal, but his.
Pedantry fail. Here's the definition [dictionary.com] of "their"; see the second case.
1. a form of the possessive case of they used as an attributive adjective, before a noun: their home; their rights as citizens; their departure for Rome.
2. (used with a singular indefinite pronoun or singular noun antecedent in place of the definite masculine his or the definite feminine her): Someone left their book on the table. It's good for the teacher to have high expectations for their students.
litre of beer is the common size in Germany usa is (Score:2)
litre of beer is the common size in Germany usa is half of that or less.
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One liter is not common in Germany.
The normal sizes are 0.4 or 0.5 for a big glass and 0.2 or 0.33 for a small glass. Smalers do exist.
Some beers are served in traditional glasses, which implies 1 liter in Bavaria or 0.2 in Cologne and Duesseldorf.
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The most common packaging is 6, 12, 18, or 24 * 16oz bottles or 12 oz cans but if it's sold as a single then it's 40oz bottle or 24oz can. A 6 pack of cans is a little over 2 liters and it would be considered normal for a guy to drink an entire 6 pack over a weekend or a 40oz bottle or 2 * 24oz cans in one evening.
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In Germany a case of good beer costs under 10 euro (plus bottle deposit) and is 20 half liter bottles. We're horribly overtaxed on alcohol in America. I'm guessing suggesting beer taxes is a good way to not get reelected in Germany. As it should be in the USA.
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That is cheap I think the last time I looked the 12 pack of bottles was like $15 and they are 16.9oz which is .5 liter (no idea if they have gone up). I rarely drink but I still remember getting a case of 24 cans for $4.99 that wasn't anytime this century though we're talking 1980s. I also remember albums, 8 tracks, gas was $.69 when I started driving, and soda fountains where they would squirt the syrup in the glass first then the carbonated water.
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That's good German beer too. Becks and better. No American can piss.
I blame Trump... (Score:2)
I need another drink to deal with this!
Heck.. Just give me a bigger glass next time!
Huh? (Score:2)
What non-alcoholic drinks a full 449ml class of wine? My bet is that the glasses are mostly larger for esthetics. The glasses are typically much less than half full when the wine is poured.
But people (Score:2)
Glass Size (Score:2)
As one of my professors told us, you have to volatize your esters...swirl the wine around. I'm betting that that didn't used to be common practice, and thus there was no need for larger glasses.
purple drank (Score:2)
My sippy cup is also much bigger today than in the past.
Wine sucked ... (Score:2)
...back then and wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry.
Marketing basics calls for increased vessel size, like saying, "apply liberally."
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Aroma (Score:3)
Still small potatoes. (Score:2)
They definitely ate less meat (Score:2)
Letters from immigrants to Ameica sent back home to Bavaria, Italy, Greece etc were recovered from dusty attics and long forgotten chests. They mention being able to eat meat/chicken every day as an astonishing thing.
Even in America 100 years ago middle class had horses and a few r
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"A chicken in every pot"? What a plagiarist. Henri IV of France said the same thing centuries earlier.
Glass design (Score:3)
Glasses are designed to aerate the wine in order to improve the flavor as well as the shape holds the aroma in the glass allowing the consumer to smell the wine as they taste it. The size and shape of the glass are important for this and specific wines have specific glasses designed just for them. I firmly believe this is dramatic overkill as I can't tell the differences between the glasses but my sommelier friends might disagree with me.
Size of the bowl has a purpose? (Score:2)
I thought that different sized glasses were to help with the bouquet and make the experience better! Not that you should Fill the glass to the top.
But it is difficult to understand where a "single serving" of wine should be filled to.
Super size everything. 20oz beer, 24oz soda, 32oz big gulp.
I looked into this awhile ago because I became concerned around drinking & driving. When I was young the limit was 0.10 the rule of thumb was "one drink per hour" Nice and simple to remember (of course now it'
wait wait wait we're jumping to conclusions (Score:3)
This looks like a huge extrapolation from a single datum.
My understanding of those large wine glasses are to show off the other, non-drinking qualities of the wine. The empty space in the globe collects the wine's bouquet, allowing you to experience more of the wine's scent as you drink, and the large diameter makes it easy to check the wine's density (tip slightly, return to upright, observe how fast the wine on the side of the glass returns to the pool).
Test by: Take your SO to a nice restaurant, order a bottle, and observe the waiter filling the glass. If he fills it all the way to the top, he's doing it wrong (and you should rethink your choice in restaurants). The glass will be about 1/3 full.
Also test by: In, say, 1930, two people would have one approx 730 ml bottle of wine with dinner. In 2017, two people would have one 730 ml bottle of wine with dinner. The size of the glass does not indicate the amount of wine consumed.
Glasses in which adult beverages are served have changed over the years. Champagne glasses, you may have noticed, generally switched in the latter part of last century from the wide "Marie Antoinette" glasses to the slightly taller, slender tulip glasses. (The reason being, the tulip glasses hold the carbonation longer.) Shall we look at this and make the leap that people are drinking drastically less champagne? Panic!
Of course, your mileage may vary. If you're drinking Badger Mountain from a box while watching Claws, you're probably using a water glass anyway. Or a jelly jar.
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Also test by, look at the size of brandy snifters. Wow, what lushes we are!
I actually see this at home (Score:2)
Go figure! You'd think bars and restaurants would want smaller glasses to sell more.
Not bloody likely (Score:2)
We have very good information on EXACTLY how much they drank, so we don't need very indirect info, like the size of wine glasses that have survived.
We have real info from things like George Washington's expense account, the manifests for ships, etc.
Coca-Cola bottles were 6 1/2 oz (Score:2)
Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans weren't 7 times smaller back then. More likely this is a result of mass production, and demand.
Re:People drink alcohol to cope with life (Score:4, Insightful)
Must we take it there? Politics in this place have already encroached into every discussion, relevant or not.
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If it was just the tail that makes decisions based on what an invisible man in the sky says there'd be a lot less of a problem.
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> What I really don't get, is the influx of right wing trolling? Normally the side that isn't in power is the one trolling, because they are the ones most upset because their views are being ignored. Check out Slashdot from 2001-2008.
You are confusing Washington with Hollywood.
We still get partisan nonsense shoved down our throats constantly. If anything, it's even worse now because it's infested outlets that used to be politically neutral. You can't get away from it.
Unless you're one of the party faithf
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These days, you wouldn't want a smaller glass, as that the chick you are trying to chat up, would have to keep stopping more often to get a refill which kills your rapport you're trying to establish and build with her after approaching her in a bar.
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IS it the "lefts" fault for forcing people out of jobs after they've been abusing the power bestowed on them? Or is it the fault of the people doing those actions?
Whatever happened to "personal responsibility", which used to be the mantra of the right? Oh, that's gone...
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Whatever happened to due process??
If you believe someone has committed these crimes...fucking charge them and go to trial, otherwise quit merely accusing and throwing the accused out and to the wolves on nothing more than accusations!!
If you aren't willing to file charges and go to court, then shut the fuck up. Accusations alone should not be enough to have someone lose their lively hood and everyt
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Hear hear!!!
What gets me the most today about the radical and even the less radical left is their outright attempts to suppress ANY views or discussion in public tha
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Seriously?
You know...at their worst I never saw the tea party rioting, hurting people, and doing everything the current LEFT has been doing in order to prevent people from merely speaking at a college like they have continuously done at Berkley and other supposed institutions or learning, diversity and sharing of ideas.
Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it may be more due to the ability to make huge amount of this stuff so it is more affordable.
A glass of wine made the traditional way (with the quality of a cheap $10 wine) adjusted for inflation would probably be $225 a bottle. Where with mass production we can make a better quality $25 bottle of wine. So today a bottle of wine isn't a trade-off of a week worth of groceries.
Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also somewhat disingenuous to conflate capacity with serving size. Modern red wine glasses, which TFA appeared to be talking about, are generally very wide to allow a large surface area at the top. They are supposed to be filled to their widest point, which is typically around 20% of the way up, and have a larger area that narrows higher up to reduce the risk of spilling.
There's also a lot of fashion involved in glass design. A couple of hundred years ago, only rich people would have drunk wine from a glass (poorer people who drank wine would have usually drunk it watered in a tankard). One big shift comes from the fact that most wine drinkers now poor their own. A hundred or two years ago, the fashion was for very small glasses and servants who would keep them filled. Having small glasses that required frequent refilling allowed you to show off the fact that you could afford a load of servants who could keep the glasses full.
Champagne flutes vary considerably in size even today (the nice crystal ones that I have are about double the capacity of the cheap mass-produced glass ones that I use when I can't be bothered with washing up and want ones that can go in the dishwasher). Its chief competitor, the Champagne coupe (which wikipedia informs me was fashionable from the 1700s to the 1970s) is a monumentally stupid design, with a large top surface area so that the champagne goes flat quickly. This was partly for the same reason: it makes your guests drink quickly so that your servants can poor a lot and you can show off how much champagne you can afford as well as the number of servants you have to pour it.
Sherry glasses have seen a shift in fashion from tiny ones that you filled to near the top, to much larger ones that look like scaled-down red-wine glasses (and are filled to around 20-30% full). Again, the glass size has one up but the serving size hasn't changed much.
A lot changed when glass became cheap to produce. For example, now it's very rare to have a bottle of sparkling wine explode, whereas a hundred and fifty years ago it wasn't too uncommon for a major champagne grower to lose a significant chunk of their inventory to bottle explosions.
Re:Humans had a smaller stature in those days (Score:5, Funny)
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Oxidation bad! You're letting the wine degas when you let it 'breath', not oxidize.
You can rush degas reds with vacuum stoppers. Pour out a glass, put in the stopper, pull a vacuum. Shake gently, remove stopper, it will be, more or less, ready.
The real breakthrough has been in testing the grapes in the fields to select ideal harvest time. That's why cheap wine is so much better. 100 years ago, the only consistently good wine came from France. Germany and Italy has some hit and miss, but the rest of the
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Oxidation bad! You're letting the wine degas when you let it 'breath', not oxidize.
Depends on the wine.
Most of the time you want it to oxidize the bad smelling/tasting aromas.
Wine actually is not supposed to have any gas inside, are you sure you are not mixing it up with "Champagne" style wines?
The problem with regions and countries regarding mass market wines is: the good wine is usually only sold inside of the country. I agree that France (but also Spain) has plentiful superb wines. And that Germany and I
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You can't avoid a water based liquid containing gasses. Not carbonation but partial pressures of a variety of gases. In the bottle those are typically products of fermentation, which need to diffuse out and let air in for the wine to taste right.
Also reds that are bottled for long term storage need much longer breathing times. More tannin protects the wine, but needs time to escape. Most reds made these days are bottled to be drunk young.
IMHO all regions produce some damn good wine these days, except I
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Bottoms up!
Why do you want my bottom up? I don't trust you with my bottom up.
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I do. Can't see the bottle without them.
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LUXURY!!!
I do Night Train...or Thunderbird, if I'm feeling like splurging!!!