Wine Bottle Sizes Table

Tradition wearing a toga of commerce. The big-format names - Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Methuselah, Salmanazar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon and Melchizedek - all come from the Old Testament, a 19th-century Bordeaux and Champagne marketing habit that turned bottle sizes into a talking point at the dinner table. The system is not perfectly tidy: some formats carry two names (the 6-liter is Methuselah in Champagne and Imperial in Bordeaux; the 27-liter is Primat or Goliath; the 30-liter is Melchizedek or Midas), and at least one entry is pure modernity - the Sovereign, 26.25 liters, was created by Taittinger in 1988 to christen the cruise liner Sovereign of the Seas. The names survive because they work: nobody remembers liters, but everyone retells the story of the Nebuchadnezzar.

Riddling, the turning-and-tilting ritual that collects fermentation sediment in the neck, becomes physically unreasonable past a certain bottle weight. Most Champagne houses cannot perform secondary fermentation in bottles larger than a Magnum, so the standard method runs: ferment in Magnum, then transfer the finished Champagne into the bigger format. The transfer costs the wine pressure, and many in the trade believe the extra handling exposes it to oxidation - which is why large-format Champagne made by transfer is considered inferior to wine that completed fermentation in the bottle it is sold in. Some houses do manage in-bottle fermentation in bigger formats at extraordinary effort and price. For the buyer, the shortcut is on the label's fine print: genuine in-bottle big formats cost multiples of the transfer-made equivalent, and now you know precisely what that multiple is buying.

Before 1979, the US standard wine and liquor bottle was the fifth: one-fifth of a US gallon, 25.6 US fluid ounces - 757 ml, a hair more than the European 750. The old American system was a whole family of gallon fractions - the tenth (379 ml), eighth (a pint, 473 ml), sixth (651 ml), fourth (a quart, 946 ml), half-gallon (1.89 L) and gallon (3.79 L) - which is why antique bottles look almost-but-not-quite like modern ones. In 1979 the US adopted metric liquor bottles, the fifth died, and the global 750 ml standard took over (a metric fifth, as the trade called it). The residue survives in language: Americans still say a fifth of whiskey, and the bottle in their hand is 7 ml smaller than the one their grandfather meant.

Often, yes - the shapes are regional tradition acting as a code. The Bordeaux family is straight-sided and high-shouldered with a pronounced punt, used for Bordeaux wines and for port and sherry (whose bottles may add a bulbous neck to collect residue). The Burgundy family is tall with sloping shoulders and a smaller punt, the shape of Burgundy and Rhone wines. German regions favor the Schlegel bottle, a slimmer, elongated Burgundy cousin. Producers in Portugal, Italy, Spain, France and Germany follow these local traditions when choosing a bottle, so before you read a label you can already narrow the wine's origin from its silhouette. There is even a curiosity format: the 620 ml Clavelin exists primarily for vin jaune, the Jura's oxidative yellow wine - a shape so tied to one wine that the bottle is effectively the appellation.