9 December 2021

Half Bottles

A product of divine mercy.

By Robert Kilconner

Glass half full; glass half empty? He is a half glass full kind of guy. That doesn’t mean that he would welcome a half-full bottle of wine in his Christmas stocking. Try that and you will discover what half empty is all about.

But what about a half bottle? Time was when these were freely available and a selection of halves of Bourgeois clarets made a very acceptable addition to the wine cellar; but like typewriters and picture postcards they have largely disappeared save in respect of sherry which can only be enjoyed when chilled and freshly opened and dessert wine which, because of its sickly nature, is generally, like the medicine which it so often imitates, drunk in small quantities.

It’s a very great pity. When two of you enjoy some roast lamb together, a nice half bottle of medoc is just the ticket. A full bottle would be just too much what with the gin and tonic to begin with and the digestif which is essential to guarantee a good night’s sleep and bring out the flavour of the post-prandial cigar. Heavens no, I am not trying to encourage readers of the Shaw Sheet to drink brandy. Indeed not, there is far too much of that sort of thing about anyway but a small glass of marc de champagne well warmed in the hand? Whatever it may say on the label, when did that do anyone anything but good? 

Then suppose the meal is an Irish stew so that weight and earthiness are needed to anchor the flavours? Why then, make the jump to the right bank of the Gironde and drink a half from St Emilion. It wouldn’t do, you see, to drink half of a full bottle because what would happen to the other half? It would sit on the side decaying or be drunk with the next night’s dinner – probably fish!

So why has the half bottle fallen from favour? Why does that half bottle rack in your cellar stand half empty? Does wine from half bottles taste sour? Well no, not exactly. It is just that it tastes sour rather earlier because it matures faster. Half bottles mature about twice as fast as full ones so if you have the sort of cellar where good wines get left on the side to be drunk on special occasions – if the Queen or the President of the United States should drop by, for example – then your half bottles will go off first so that, assuming that statistically a Head of State is likely to get thirsty while passing your door every million years or so, the chance of a half bottle being fit to serve at that moment is roughly half that of an ordinary bottle. This is the mathematics which restricts half bottle sales.

But there is another angle which the wine merchants have not spotted. Every year advertisements flash across our screens urging us to buy wine “en primeur” – ie not yet bottled. The descriptions are mouthwatering. Deep and subtle flavours, more notes than in a Mozart symphony. Cheap too by normal standards. But there is a fly in the ointment. The drinking date is ten years away and being well into one’s seventies one may just be laying up vintages for the younger generation who will probably mix it with orange juice. The remedy: bring forward that drinking date by buying halves. That after all is why the Almighty invented them – an act of divine mercy to mitigate the greatest disadvantage of human mortality.

tile photo:   Ameer Basheer on Unsplash