The poet Robert Burns imagined a man toasting his lover with a “pint o’ wine”, and Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous proponent of the pint bottle for champagne. Now, Rishi Sunak’s government has spied a “Brexit opportunity” to legalise the sale of wine by the pint once more – if it can persuade anyone to make the bottles.
Still and sparkling wine will be sold in 200ml, 500ml and 568ml (pint) sizes in 2024, alongside existing measures, under new rules, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) announced on Wednesday. It said the change was made possible by Brexit.
However, the pint-sized move appeared to be the extent of a push towards imperial measures, after a government consultation into allowing more businesses to buy and sell using them resulted in no new action.
Why don’t we apply these rules to all things? Why just milk and booze?
Because liquids are harder to judge just from looking, compared to solids, and the UK has a history - pre weights and measures act - of fuckery.
Cheese, for example, is sold by weight, and back in the day markets would have weigh rooms so you could confirm that the grocer’s scales were correct.
And while the weight and measures act was created to stop “fuckry”
Bottle size and glass size was only applied to alchole not pther liquids.
That was a war thing. Allong with closing times for pubs. Created to limit lunchtime drinking for amunition workers. Standadised glass and bottle size allowed those workers to judge their intake.
Many werr less good with number then today. So a lot of our pre war measurement were based on things people deltwith as a rough estimat. (Acre was the amount a hourse cpuld plough without needing a break.) Stuff loke that.
Also thier already existed a tradition if not law for glass sizes. As land ownees felt controlling poor folks use of alcahole how to help the poor. So pubs often only got the right to open on thoer land based on these 1800 ideals.
All sorts of our history went into the choices at the time. The legal act was just one part.
But most were clearly defined for a te where we did not have to deal with multiple nations using different bersions of the pint etc. As was true in mosr of europe at the time.
Metric was a bloody good idea. And is freaking stupid to reverse now.
I really dont thinl the tories calling for this crap are intouch enough even with theor desired vote.
Im 53. So grew up using both units. But even folks my fathers age do not temd to support thos now. It was there pre war parents that wanted it. And their really are not many of them left voting.
It might have changed, but at one point you could only sell pre-sliced bread in 400g or multiples of that.