Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Oversized 750 ml Bottles

Harvey Steiman:

One minor frustration of cellaring wine is what to do about oversized bottles. I don’t mean magnums--I mean single bottles that hold the standard 750 milliliters, but are either so wide or so tall that they don’t fit into standard storage.

Yes, I understand why wineries do it. It makes it seem like the wine inside is classier, more formidable. But today, with concerns about carbon footprints and what’s best for the earth, big bottles just don’t make sense. They use more fuel to make, handle and ship, both before they are filled with wine and after.

Well said. My wine cellar is set up for double deep racking, so that 2 bottles should fit into each slot. It’s also designed so that the slots are wide enough to take wide bottles, up to and including traditional Champagne bottles. In recent years, however, all too many wines have come in bottles that are either so tall that only one bottle per slot will fit or, in the most egregious cases, so wide that they have to go into my limited bulk storage areas. Pahlmeyer, for example, is a regular offender on this score.

For the sake of proper wine storage and the environment, this is a trend that needs to be nipped in the bud.