How Many Glasses Of Wine Are In A Bottle?

A pour is a pour is a pour, except when it's not. When it comes to wine, each type of bottle and the different kinds of wine you're pouring determine how many glasses of wine you'll get from a single bottle. Most standard wine bottles contain 750 milliliters of wine, which breaks down to about five individual glasses (in case you need a head count for your next shindig). That's about 150 milliliters of wine per glass. 

However, depending on where you are in the world, the number of glasses changes depending on the alcohol content in the wine. In other words, even if the wine bottle contains 750 milliliters of the good stuff, you may not get five glasses of wine from the bottle. For example, a bottle of German riesling, with its 8% alcohol by volume (ABV), would come out to 4.7 glasses of wine instead of five glasses. This is because the wine's alcohol content sometimes determines how much liquid is in the glass and, therefore, how many units of alcohol you'd be consuming per glass. 

This way of ABV-content wine-pouring is usually geographically specific to certain parts of the world, like Australia. That said, you'd follow a similar rule when serving wines like a port. Bottles of port wine net 10 glasses because the alcohol content is higher than that of your standard wines, which means less port in the glass.

You might be inclined to think that the glass size has some bearing on how you pour most wines, but mostly, that's not the case. There's no such thing as a convenient economy size for wine. A bigger glass doesn't mean more wine, from an etiquette point of view, anyway. Five ounces is the standard pour of wine, regardless of the size of the glass, with some exceptions. Champagne's an outlier here.

Like other bottles of wine, Champagne bottles come standard at 750 milliliters. However, because Champagne flutes are thinner than regular wine glasses and because of the fizz factor of Champagne, most glasses of bubbly come in at about four ounces. This conservative-sized pour also concerns why many bubbly drinkers pour Champagne in the first place: the toast. Most people drink less Champagne for a toast than they do when they are, say, sipping wine with brunch. In light of that, you'll get about six-and-a-quarter flutes of Champagne from each bottle of bubbly. 

While larger glasses may not mean you get more wine per pour, different bottle sizes do mean that some bottles have more than five glasses and some have less. For example, the Piccolo bottle – sometimes called a split – equals a single glass of wine, a demi pours two glasses, a standard bottle holds five or six, and a magnum bottle will yield 12. Yes, that's 12 glasses. But Champagne and wine bottle sizes don't stop at the magnum.

Large bottles of vino hike up the number of glasses you'll get per bottle, like the Methuselah, the Solomon, and the granddaddy of them all — the Melchizedek –  all of which serve around 30, 130, and 180 glasses of wine, respectively. What's more, there are wine bottle sizes in between those three big 'uns, like the Nebuchadnezzar, which pours 100 standard glasses of vino. These large bottles could be considered economy-size and are probably best left for big parties, like weddings, where lots of wine will be flowing. Otherwise, you could lose a lot of wine to premature aging and staleness if left undrunk in the bottle for too long.