We drink more wine now because glasses are bigger, apparently
Ever woken up feeling a little worse for wear despite the fact you only had a couple of glasses of wine the night before?
You’re not the only one – in fact, everyone is drinking more wine than we used to, even if we haven’t been drinking more glasses of it.
According to the Guardian, a behavioural scientist speaking at the Hay festival revealed that an increase in the size of our wine glasses in the past few hundred years has encouraged us to drink much more than we should.
Probably because they’ve increased from a modest 65ml (yes, we know) to 450ml in the past 300 years.
Which means they’re almost seven times bigger than they used to be.
Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge University, said that her team’s research into 18th century wine glasses at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, 19th-century wine glasses owned by Buckingham Palace, and modern glasses at John Lewis made it pretty clear that glasses had got bigger.
And she said that the 1990s were a “key period” for this.
To prove this theory, the researchers also carried out a six-week experiment at a wine bar – selling 175ml of wine in three different sized glasses at different times.
Sales in the biggest glasses rose 14%, with no difference in the other two.
So next time your glass of Pinot arrives in an unusually-large glass, you know what’s going on.
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