How Many Glasses of Wine are in a Bottle of Wine?

By Rob Cockerham | September 17, 2010

In August, Nick and Alisha announced that they are getting married. Yeah!

A lot of planning and testing is required to throw the perfect wedding reception, and one of the first tests is to figure out how many glasses of wine you get from one bottle. On Monday night, we decided to find out.

Wine is probably the most expensive way to get drunk. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It's also the classiest.

Most of the wine sold in the world is packaged in 25.3 ounce (750 ml) bottles.

Like all bottles of alcohol, wine is contained by a top you cannot remove with your bare hands. Beer is sealed with bottlecaps, wine is sealed with corks and gin is sealed with those black security caps I pry off and hide behind the racks of frozen pizza.

With the cork removed, the wine is ready to be enjoyed.

If you are sharing the wine, it is best to use glasses.

Before I dive into this, I wanted to get an estimate of the sizes of some other drinks in my house.

The amount of wine in a bottle is a little less than four of these Minute Maid Juice boxes.

And it's crushingly unimpressive within a two liter soda bottle.

Now back to the experiment, using our typical wine glasses. They each hold a maximum of 400 ml.

First, I distributed a bottle of wine evenly between five glasses. That's 150 ml, or 5 ounces of wine each.

Wow. Even this small portion, a fifth of a bottle, looks like a decent glass of wine!

This is because the bottom of the wine glass is narrow, I guess, but usually a globe is not a very good way to enhance a volume of water. Because the volume of wine enters the tall cylindrical section of the glass, maybe our minds percieve it as a tall cylinder of wine, instead of a half-ball.

Hard liquor is also sold in 750 ml bottles. These are known as a "fifth", because they are 1/5th of a gallon (25.6 ounces). So these wine portions can be considered "a fifth of a fifth".

For the next picture, I split the bottle between four glasses of wine. That's 187 ml, or 6.3 ounces of wine each.

The difference in volume is barely noticable. If I owned a restaurant, charging $12 a glass, I'd probably coach my servers on how to get exactly 150 milliliters into a glass. Also, I'd heat the wine and recommend GIANT ice cubes.

But don't start thinking that 6.3 ounces is a large quantity of liquid. A Capri Sun mylar juice bag is 6.7 ounces.

The next step was more noticable. A bottle of wine split among three glasses.

Split three ways, you get great big glasses of wine.

This image should bring you back to your college days. Possibly your high school days.

These troublemakers are 250ml, or 8.5 ounces each.

And finally, if the math hadn't told you, the pictures will. A bottle of wine fits into two wine glasses, with just a breath of space left to spare. Each glass contains 375 ml or 12.5 oz.

These glasses look plain ridiculous, but its the only way to fit a bottle of wine into the cup holders of my Elantra.

You can certainly fit a whole bottle in one glass, you just need a larger glass.

Or you could attach two glasses with some silicone. That would hold a bottle of wine.

Here are our findings captured in a single image.

While we were at it, we uncorked a bottle of sparkling wine, just to get an idea of how that would look distributed among some glasses, known as flutes. As you probably know, flute music is the most likely to lull you into bed, and champagne flutes are used to ensure you take your clothes off first.

Champagne is also sold in 750 ml bottles, but the flutes don't hold nearly as much as wine glasses. This one bottle filled all of our flutes, and all the ones we borrowed from Nick and Alisha. Eight total.

I mean seven.

Mavel Tov!