A pint of wine? Britain plans to bring back an old-fashioned measure.
In 2024, the British can drink like Winston Churchill again.
The government announced on Wednesday it would allow shops and pubs to sell pints of wine, reportedly the former prime minister’s favorite drink of champagne.
What? But also: why?
It is a side effect of Brexit, Britain’s official departure from the European Union in 2020, after which the country no longer had to comply with European rules about weights and dimensions.
In the announcement introduction of small wine bottles On Wednesday, Britain’s Conservative government boasted that the move was part of the country’s “new Brexit freedoms.”
Brace yourself, because the numbers are about to get a little weird.
Beer, wine and spirits are sold across borders, and while the liquids may not change from country to country, their packaging sometimes does, according to measurements taken centuries ago by governments trying to regulate their sales. Most standard bottles of wine hold 750 milliliters, or about five glasses, but there are also several not-so-standard options.
The traditional Imperial British measurement system was codified in 1824, when the British Weights and Measures Act standardized the use of units, including the gallon, pound and yard. The British government began adopting the metric system on a voluntary basis in 1965, but after the country joined the European Economic Community, manufacturers were required to display metric measurements in addition to traditional imperial measurements.
The imperial pint – 568 milliliters, or just under 20 imperial fluid ounces – was one of Britain’s cherished traditional measures. (Not to be confused with the American definition of a pint, namely 473 milliliters, or 16 US ounces, and will not appear again in this article.)
The best approach during the EU years was the 500 milliliter bottle, which is two-thirds the size of a standard bottle and holds about three glasses of wine. Those bottles – less than two ounces smaller than the pint-size bottles – remain common in UK stores, as do a few other sizes.
What’s behind those 68 extra milliliters?
After Brexit, the British government started a review of European regulations that it wanted to roll back. The wine pint announcement on Wednesday came after around 100,000 people responded to a government consultation on whether they wanted to return more broadly to the old-fashioned imperial system of measurement (things like inches, miles and gallons instead of meters, kilometers and liters), which has already no longer in official use for decades.
(In an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Mail in 2019, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said using the imperial system was an “old freedom.”)
The government said it had decided not to take legislative action, after only 1.3 percent of respondents said they were open to a return of the imperial system.
And while Britain will continue to use the metric system for other food and drink, the small bottle of wine is a symbolic gesture.
The imperial government boasted of the country’s “long and proud history” and promised that the extra 1.8 ounces of wine would “help boost innovation, increase business freedoms and improve consumer choice.”
Would it?
A 500 milliliter bottle of wine would only be sellable on the British market, which is smaller than that of many European countries. There will be around 200 wineries in England in 2022, according to WineGB, an association of winemakers in Great Britain. France and Italy, famous for their wine production, each have tens of thousands of wineries in comparison.
It is therefore uncertain whether wine producers will opt for the new-old measurement. But at least one Brit would have welcomed the change if he were alive: a joke famously attributed to Churchill was his claim that a pint of champagne was just ‘enough for two at lunch and one for dinner’.