While there are many ways to judge wine – depth, balance, structure, expression of terroir – the most important factor is bottle size. After all, at a dinner party, what’s the ratio of people admiring your Henri Jayer to people praying you’ll stop explaining who Henri Jayer is? Meanwhile, you show up to that dinner with a three-liter of anything and you are Dionysus, delivering a wine that they cannot imagine how you procured. Here’s an analogy that will make this easier to understand: Would you rather have a small, 80-year-old, Burgundian penis or a huge penis from Fresno, California? A giant-ass bottle of wine signals abundance. It screams “party.” When Jesus turned water into wine for that wedding, do you think it was one bottle? He abracadabra’ed more than 120 gallons of wine. Even if every single person in Cana was invited to that wedding, that’s more than six glasses per Galilean, which is even more shocking if you saw the size of the average Galilean. There’s a reason Galilee didn’t have an NFL team:
If Jesus came back to that party with a glass and a half, we’d all still be Jews. A regular-sized bottle is the equivalent of four beers. If you show up to a dinner with four beers, you’re a dick. You’re saying, “I got myself covered.” Four servings is like bringing half a cake. With a huge bottle, everyone is drinking the same thing all night. This not only makes the meal more communal but also eliminates the annoyance of people searching the table for a bottle they like and then saying, “I only drink Sancerre.” Sure, there are challenges in bringing a large bottle. The main one is that someone will start a conversation about whether your bottle is called a methuselah, a nebuchadnezzar or some other king of Israel. Luckily, this is precisely the kind of boredom that is cured by a 3-liter bottle’s 13 ounces of pure alcohol. Opening a bottle larger than a magnum is a fun group activity. It’s actually not any harder than opening a normal bottle, since the cork is the same size. But it looks like a project, thereby getting lots of dudes involved with their ideas of how to saw off the wax with power tools. Pouring a large bottle also looks harder than it is. Drinking it, however, is actually hard. I’ve mistakenly opened six-liter bottles both at my son’s bar-mitzvah and a Passover seder, forgetting that you need gentiles to drink that much wine. I think I got fooled by that kings-of-Israel nomenclature. But large-format bottles have an even more important function than impressing people at a party: Impressing people in your wine cellar. When a half-drunk dinner guest follows me to my cellar after dinner to get more wine, it’s challenging to get them to notice the Chateau Mouton Rothschild no matter how many times I say, “Now, where’s that Chateau Mouton Rothschild?” But they always spot the six-liter bottle of Chateau Cantemerle, because it’s lying on its side on a specially built wooden holder. It’s the pick-me girl of wine. Cellaring large bottles is also smart because large bottles age more slowly and gracefully, since they have the same amount of air between the cork and wine as 750ml bottles, allowing the more subtle non-oxygen-related aging to develop. Also, the thicker glass of large bottles protects against temperature and light. They’re great long-term investments due to their rarity. These are things I tell my wife when I buy them, but I don’t at all believe. Large-format bottles are so inviting that many restaurants display empty plastic versions provided by wineries. Steakhouses don’t hang plastic T-Rex-sized ribeyes from the ceiling. Strip clubs don’t frame their entrances with 24-foot-tall blow-up dolls. Those would scare customers away. But huge wine bottles are inviting. Are they classy? Is that a question anyone asks in the age of Instagram? Are you going to get tired of drinking the same bottle of wine all night, hoping it finally pairs with one of the later courses? Are you overthinking this in the age of Instagram? People are going to take a photo next to your bottle, and that’s more than they usually care about wine. Every time I’ve left a party after bringing a 3- or 6-liter bottle, my empty bottle stayed behind. The hosts displayed that dead soldier somewhere in their house, like a deer trophy commemorating a memorable night. Is that worth paying a little extra for the liquid inside? I’m not sure. But I do know that it’s better than wasting the Jayer on those people. You're currently a free subscriber to The Corrupt Wine Writer. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Friday, October 24, 2025
What Wine Should You Bring to a Dinner Party?
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