Thursday, July 26 2012

The Beverages of Brobdingnag

Repetitive stress injury from opening 200 bottles in 3, 2, 1 . . . 

 

I'm a big fan of Jonathan Swift, although I sometimes think if he were alive today he'd be at a loss as to where to apply his sarcasm first. I was really thinking of him this week, when it seemed that gigantic beverages and bottles have become all the rage. It was as though one of the citizens of Brobdingnag was getting careless with the contents of their booze cupboard. 

First came the news that the Cuban bar where Ernest Hemingway used to corrode his synapses made the world's largest daiquiri:

The old man and the sea of rum

 

Which in itself is a mildly amusing publicity stunt--250 litres rum, lime and ice sounds pretty good if you've got three or four hundred friends dropping by for a cocktail. But the real kicker that's been filling my inbox with 'You should see this!' and 'When will you carry these?' is an enormous wine bottle made for a trade-show in China. 

The convenient single-serving size

 

 From the article: 

Austrian Times reports that Chinese firm Jinding Co. created this outrageously huge bottle of wine for the Sixth Yantai International Wine Expo, which is held in the country's Shandong province. It's filled with a new variety of wine produced especially for the event.

The bottle's enormous proportions stretch 30 feet long and eight feet wide, and the whole thing weights three tons.

A pretty impressive stunt--I've been to wine trade shows in China, and it takes something this outrageous to stand out from the crowd. The sheer size of it is not only compelling, but also raises some interesting questions, like, "How much wine does it hold?" The article doesn't say, and there isn't really much other information on the internets, so after the third person asked me today, I decided to figure it out myself, in terms of how many Winexpert kits it would take to fill it up. 

In order to sort this out I decided to take an average of  the seventeen different wine bottles I have in my office right now (what, you don’t have forty cases of wine in your office? What do you drink at work?). I picked a bottle from the median group and got out a measuring tape.

It came out to about 30 centimeters tall with an inner diameter (the inside of the glass) of 6.5 centimeters. According to the secret markings on the base of one bottle (750 06), 6 centimetres down the neck from the top lip is 750 ml in volume. Eyeballing it, it has a hard slope on the shoulder and a deep punt. Rather than do a complex double calculation subtracting the volume of a half-sphere on one end and adding it back at the other, I chose to pretend the punt and the shoulder (along with the remaining bit of neck) cancel each other out, and measure the length based on the portion of the bottle that is a full 6.5 cm in diameter. The shoulder drops off at 22.25 cm from the base, therefore I’m going to say we are looking at a cylinder 22.5 cm tall with a radius (half of diameter) of 3.25 cm

This is close enough for our purposes, and we’ll check it with ARITHMETIC (note that this isn’t math. Math is hard and I’m unqualified, but I can do most arithmetic).

A cylinder with radius r and height h has a volume of V given by

V = πr²h

V = 3.14 (3.25²)22.25

3.14 x 10.5625 x 22.25 = 738 ml

Okay, somewhere in the punt/shoulder slope/neck I lost a few millilitres, but we’re pretty much on track. If we check the original story, the bottle is thirty feet long (914 centimetres) and eight feet (243.84 centimetres) wide (diameter). If we assign the same kind of value to it that we did to the arbitrary bottle, then 22.25 feet (685.8 centimetres) is the length of our cylindrical portion, casting off the punt, neck, slope etc., and four feet (121.9 centimetres) is our radius.

Because Imperial/USA units are so 16th century, we’ll move to strictly metric from here.

V = 3.14 (121.9²)685.8

3.14 x 14,860 x 685.8 = 31,999,702 about 32 million millilitres or about 32 thousand litres.

A standard Winexpert kit makes 23 litres, minus some racking losses, so we can round up.

32,000/23 = 1391, call it 1400 kits to fill the novelty giant bottle, which also works out to 42,000 bottles of wine, or 3,500 cases. 

 

Even for me, that's a lot of winemaking. 

Posted by Sir William Steele AT 1:19PM

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