Are you throwing a dinner party or wine tasting event soon? Are you curious about how many bottles of wine you will need to keep your guests happily tipsy without over doing it? Here we’re going to look at alcohol by volume, and the standard amounts of wine found in any given bottle. A standard bottle of wine that you would find in a restaurant or supermarket holds 750 milliliters (25.4 ounces) of liquid, which should be enough for six standard glasses of wine.
However, wine is always much more exciting and complex than the standard rule! What if you are trying to wow your friends with a tasting party? Sommeliers know to pour 60 milliliters of wine to savor and taste, so calculate that you should be able to get about twelve tasting pours out of a standard bottle of wine.
When you just want to enjoy some wine at a dinner party with friends, pours generally tend to be a little on the heavier side. In this case, calculate four glasses of wine per bottle. The standard etiquette for wine availability at a dinner party calls for one bottle for every two guests. Then of course depending on peoples’ tastes bottles will get passed around and pours will vary!
What are some of the non-standard wine bottle sizes?
First, wine bottle sizes for one reason or another are based on the names of biblical kings! So, despite the .75 liter being the standard, here are some other sizes you might want to know about:
The smallest wine bottle size is the 187.5 ml piccolo or split, which traditionally holds a single-serving of champagne. Then there is the 375 ml demi bottle, which is just a half bottle, for travel or picnics. 750 ml is our standard, followed by the 1.5 Liter Magnum bottle. Next is the 3.0 Liter Double Magnum, then the 4.5 Liter Jeroboam which is the equivalent of six bottles of wine! Finally, there are the 6 Liter Imperial and the 9 Liter Salmanazar, the 12 Liter Balthazar and the massive 15 Liter Nebuchadnezzar!
In Italy, we also enjoy vino sfuso, which is wine that can be purchased from jugs either directly at the vineyard, or in a vino sfuso shop. Here, you can really get any volume you need, as you are able to bring in your own wine vessel and the shop owner will fill it up with any of the wines on sales. This is a great way to get a large volume (think 3 or 5-liter box) to keep in the pantry and refill your .75-liter bottle of table wine that you drink at dinner every day.
Really, the number of glasses of wine in the bottle depends on who is doing the pouring! There are in fact glasses of wine (gag gifts, certainly) that hold an entire liter of wine in just one glass! So, you can honestly say you only had one…
