Pint of your finest champagne, please!

The British news is full of stories about how we might once again be buying champagne in pint bottles. Is there any truth to it?

One of the joys of being a jobbing wine ‘expert’ is that I get occasionally asked on the radio to comment on wine-related things - often things I know nothing about and I’m not terribly interested in. Such an occasion occurred on Wednesday when I was contacted to express my view on the Kait Borsay show on Times radio about how wine would once again be sold in pint bottles in Britain for the first time since 1973.

Churchill enjoying some Pol Roger, though sadly not a pint bottle.

It’s a story that’s been doing the rounds since 2016 but now it looks like it could finally be happening. The government has revoked EU legislation on wine bottle sizes meaning that potentially we could all be toasting 2026 or sooner with pints of champagne. Business minister Kevin Hollinrake said: 'Winston Churchill's favourite tipple was a pint of champagne and thanks to our exit from the EU, Mail readers will soon be able to enjoy a pint of the good stuff again’.

That was in the Daily Mail but the majority of the media went with the government line. From about 20 minutes reading online, however, it seems clear that this is never going to happen for reasons I will come on to. I thought this would be a fun way of looking at this story but when I said as much on air, Borsay seemed a bit put out and quickly moved on to the next item. I suppose nobody likes to be told that their story is balls.

The champagne in pints story first emerged after the referendum of 2016 when Britain voted to leave the EU. As with much of the middle classes, the wine trade took the decision badly. There was much gnashing of teeth and tearing of red trousers which I found extremely funny at the time. But it has to be said that in the short term since we finally left the EU in 2020, Brexit has made things much more complicated for the trade and wine producers in England and Wales. And wine has become significantly more expensive since then.

While the rest of the British wine business was raging, in the spirit of mischief, Berry Bros & Rudd and Pol Roger UK cooked up a good news story about Brexit: released from the malign shackles of the EU we could once again be drinking champagne from imperial pint bottles just as Winston Churchill did (imagine stirring music playing as you read those words). All great fun and annoyed all the right people but as Simpson later admitted it was almost certainly not going to happen: ‘It's a non-story trying to be a story which we've sort of encouraged over the years because it amuses us, and it harks a bit back to the Churchill link,’ Simpson said.

The problem is that it would require champagne producers who make millions of bottles a year on vast bottling lines to switch over some of their wine to pint bottles. Furthermore, you would need a glass manufacturer to make champagne bottles in the right size which would mean making new pint-size moulds. All this for a market which is potentially miniscule. 

The media jumped on the pint story, something that is probably never going to happen, but missed the real story which is admittedly not as eye-catching as there’s no imperial vs metric, EU vs UK, Churchill vs the world element. It’s that sparkling wine is now allowed to be sold in 50cl bottles - just under a pint. For reasons that I am sure made sense to the proverbial Brussels bureaucrats, still and fortified wines and spirits can be sold in half litre bottles but not sparkling. 

Now English and Welsh sparkling wine producers can do just that. Freedom! You will probably have to wait some time for most 50cl sparkling wines but one man has had the foresight to bottle some already, Mark Driver at Rathfinny in Sussex, one of the country’s leading producers. Driver has long been one of the few taking a broadly positive view of Brexit: ‘it offers opportunities to take a different path’, he told me when I interviewed him for my English wine book. Now the Rathfinny Mini, as it’s called, will be available in 2024. He filled me in:

We first produced some back in 2015 then again with the 2020 and 2021 vintages, when we were told that the measure would become legal. But it’s been slow to materialise. It seemed absurd to us that you can sell still wine in 50cl bottles but not sparkling, as it’s the ideal sized bottle for two to share at lunch or before dinner. We’re test marketing them with two hotel groups over the next two months and the feedback from the off trade has been very positive. Unfortunately the government insisted on talking about pints which will never happen.

It’s common in Spain to see fino sherry served in restaurants in 50cl bottles so I can’t see why this shouldn’t succeed. If it does take off, you might even see champagne houses bottling special 50cl bottles for the UK market. But pint bottles? Very unlikely.