In 2024, Brits will once again be able to drink like Winston Churchill.
The government announced on Wednesday that it will allow shops and pubs to sell pints of wine, popularly said to be the former prime minister’s favorite amount of champagne.
What? But also, why?
This is a side effect of Brexit, the official exit of Britain from the European Union in 2020, after which, among other things, the country will no longer have to comply with European rules about weights and measures.
In the announcement introduction of pint-size wine bottles on Wednesday, Britain’s Conservative government boasted that the move was part of the country’s “new Brexit freedoms”.
Buckle up, because the numbers are about to get weird.
Beer, wine and spirits are sold across borders, and while liquids may not change from one country to the next, their containers sometimes change, according to measurements set centuries ago. past governments trying to regulate their sale. Most standard wine bottles hold 750 milliliters, or about five glasses, but there are also some less common options.
Britain’s traditional imperial measurement system was codified in 1824, when the British Weights and Measures Act standardized the use of units, including gallons, pounds and yards. The British government began introducing the metric system on a voluntary basis in 1965, but after the country joined the European Economic Community, manufacturers had to display metric measurements in addition to the traditional imperial ones.
The imperial pint — 568 milliliters, or less than 20 imperial fluid ounces — is one of Britain’s cherished traditional measures. (Not to be confused with American definition of a pint, which is 473 milliliters, or 16 US ounces and will not be featured further in this article.)
Its closest approximation in EU years is 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 pint-sizes – remain common in British shops, as do several other sizes.
What’s behind those 68 extra milliliters
After Brexit, the British government began conducting a review of the European regulations it wanted to roll back. Wednesday’s announcement about the wine pint came after around 100,000 people responded to a government consultation on whether they wanted to return more broadly to the old-fashioned imperial measurement system (things like inches, miles and gallons instead of meters, kilometers and liters), which have been unofficially used for decades.
(In an interview with British newspaper The Daily Mail (in 2019, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that using the imperial system was an “ancient freedom.”)
The government said it decided against the legislative proposals after only 1.3 percent of respondents said they were open to the return of the imperial system.
And so while Britain will continue to use the metric system for other food and drink, the pint-size bottle of wine is a symbolic gesture.
Boasting the country’s “long and proud history” through imperial measures, the government promised that the extra 1.8 ounces of alcohol would “help to boost innovation, increase business freedoms and improve choice for consumers.”
is it possible
A 568-milliliter bottle of wine can only be sold in the British market, which is smaller than in many European countries. There will be around 200 wineries in England in 2022, according to WineGB, an association of winemakers in Britain. France and Italy, famous for their wine production, each have tens of thousands of wineries in comparison.
So it is uncertain whether any wine producers will opt in to the new old size. But at least one British man might welcome the change, if he were still alive: a famous joke attributed to Churchill was his remark that a pint of champagne was “just enough for two at lunch and one for at dinner.”
