Drinking More, Refilling Less

Is this a great time to be alive, or what?

Not only is the stock market soaring, unemployment is dropping and the Wofford Terriers beat the Tar Heels, but a new scientific study shows that the size of wine glasses has increased “seven-fold” in the past 300 years.

I’ll drink to that.

Where wine drinkers sporting powdered wigs once sipped from chalices barely bigger than shot glasses, modern wine lovers can quaff their wine from goldfish bowls. 

“It is truly a gift to have the ability to drink an entire bottle of wine without refilling the glass,” a reviewer once said of super-sized wine glasses, according to The Washington Post.

A wine glass study is precisely the sort of frivolous research I’d usually denounce as a waste of money if it was conducted at a American college using tax dollars. But this study was prepared by the University of Cambridge. In England. 

Didn’t cost us a penny.

Heck, if the Brits want to blow their dough studying wine glass size for our amusement, far be it from me to suggest they stop. In fact, carry on. 

Unlike Americans, the British people seem to have no qualms about wasting money. How else to explain their continued support of a monarchy? No doubt the queen herself drinks from a colossal glass - one trimmed in 14k gold - and held to her lips by a servant.

The Cambridge study found that wine glass sizes have been “ballooning” over the centuries with a huge spurt in the past 20 years that coincided “with a surge in wine consumption.”

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Seems the same psychological phenomena that occurs when people eat off dinner plates the size of satellite dishes also applies to drinking vessels. The larger the plate, the more food we eat. The bigger the glass, the more we swig.

The more we swig, the happier we are, and with that I’d like to raise a cup - a capacious one - to our friends across the Atlantic.

Cheers!

Keep up the good work.