Shrinkflation is coming for fine wine. Maybe that’s a good thing.

“In praise of the half bottle”

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Shorter baguettes, fewer biscuits, and less oil. But the bottle remains the bottle. Whilst malleable plastic packaging shrinks around its contents in every aisle of the supermarket, the rigid glass of the bottle stands firm, set solid against the sands of time. Or so we thought.

The standard 750ml bottle size has remained much the same since the 1800s. Whilst the measure began only as a useful common denominator between the English metric millilitre and the French imperial gallon, it came to represent the expected standard for good quality wine. Wine consumers, obsessed with prestige and tradition for the 200 years since, wouldn’t have felt quite right about a bottle that wasn’t quite as heavy in the hand. Perhaps more importantly, to make the bottle any smaller would have increased prices astronomically, as the cost of a glass bottle can be as high as the cost of the contents for cheaper wines. This is why the inexpensive plastic mini-bottle of inexpensive wine have been around for so long on supermarket shelves: the packaging is cheaper, and the consumers don’t care so much about traditions.

But now, more and more restaurants and fine wine retailers are now offering customers a smaller way to enjoy their Pauillac or Meursault: the half bottle. For restaurants, by-the-glass options have always lacked the theatre and the implicit trust of uncorking a bottle, whilst the 750ml bottle can be a challenge for whole tables to agree on. For retailers, half bottles enable them to offer customers a middle ground between drinking and not drinking, allowing them each to squeeze every last bit of revenue out of their would-be consumers. These considerations, it seems, have finally outstripped the higher cost of smaller glass bottles, and the conservative attitudes of wine enthusiasts. Buoyed by a rise in solo drinking during lockdown, wine merchants are increasingly pushing their half bottle selections, and there are companies trading exclusively in smaller format fine wines. Wineries have responded to

This is one instance of shrinkflation we can’t try to angrily pin on supermarket greed. Fine wine is still the preserve of boutique wine merchants rather than multinational retailers, and is hardly the epicentre of a cost-of-living crisis. So how should we feel about the flourishing of the half bottle?

There are quite a few practical benefits to the ever wider availability of half bottles. Not shareing, maybe someone is driving, maybe people want different things. Quicker ageing too!

The biggest thing is how much easier it makes to taste different wines. Fine wine used to be for drinking. Now its for tasting. Look at Vagabond and Coravin. Drinking is out, and tasting is in. This is the key difference between the shrinkflation of food and the shrinkflation of wine. Food will always still be about sustenance and eating. But wine is less about drinking, and more about tasting.