🍷 Wine bottle sizes

Wine bottle sizes are a whole range of capacities, from small to huge. The base of the range is the standard bottle of 0.75 litre. Below it is the half bottle (0.375 litre). Above it is the magnum of 1.5 litres, equal to two standard bottles.

Next come names taken from the Bible. A Jeroboam holds 3 to 4.5 litres, a Methuselah 6 litres, a Salmanazar 9, a Balthazar 12, a Nebuchadnezzar 15 litres. There are even bigger ones. Such bottles are more common for sparkling wines and Bordeaux châteaux than for ordinary table wines.

The clavelin stands apart: a small 0.62-litre bottle used for the yellow wine of the Jura. Size matters for ageing: in larger bottles wine matures more slowly and evenly. But they are harder to store, fill and pour. So large sizes are more often collectors' or festive items. The whole range falls under the general idea of the wine bottle.