A Guide to Champagne Bottle Sizes

You know what sets Champagne apart from literally any other alcohol? The truly impressive range of Champagne bottle sizes. Compared to large champagne bottles, a growler of beer is child's play. Liquor only has a measly six containers. But Champagne? You can drink Champagne out of 14 vessels of different sizes.

The bottles span from a "quarter," which is .2 liters, or a bit more than one glass of bubbly, to a "Melchizedek," which is 30 liters, or 40 regular-sized bottles of the stuff. After you get past the names for the smaller bottles, like "demi" and "magnum," you get to the biblical ones, like "Methuselah" (the oldest man, according to the Bible) and "Solomon" (you know, the King of Israel). Why lend a biblical monarch's name to a gigantic glass vessel full of booze? The answer is, essentially, we don't know. The reason for these names has been largely lost to history, according to Mosaic Magazine. Some argue that Jeroboam kicked off the trend, and that "the other biblical names were imitations of this, probably humorously intended."

Regardless, I like to think that Champagne makers, bottlers, and drinkers simply realized that a party is a party, no matter how small. And therefore, we ought to have a bottle fit for a solo celebration, as well as a gathering for hundreds of people. And who can argue with that?