Wine Bottle Sizes

I have a hard time throwing things away.

Today I've been spending time trying to sort through piles of papers in my office in hopes of finding some empty desktop space underneath - actual empty physical space.

In one pile I found this small piece of paper clipped from a Wired Magazine - dated November 2012, more than four years ago.

I saved this because I thought it would make a nice subject for a blog post.  I tossed the rest of the magazine and have since stopped my subscription to Wired.  There's just so many articles a guy can read in one lifetime making the point that computers and the big businesses they inspire will save the world.  (It's not true no matter how futuristic you think you are.)

Anyway, here's that scrap of paper . . .

And here's the same list in list form:

Containers for wine and spirits (by liters):

• Magnum: 1.5
• jeroboam: 3
• flagon: 3.785
• rehoboam: 4.5
• Methuselah: 6
• Salmanazar: 9
• Nebuchadnezzar: 15
• rundlet: 68.2
• tierce: 159
• barrique: 225
• hogshead: 239
• firkin: 318
• butt: 477

Only "rundlet" fails Google's online spell checker.

Most bottles of wine and booze in the stores around here are 750 milliliters, or half a Magnum.

Why, I wonder, are some of these items capitalized and others not.  If only names are capitalized, who is Magnum?  Here's an actual picture of Nebuchadnezzar that I found on line.

And here's our cat, Spackle Puss inspecting the magnum of beer - oops, excuse me - the Magnum of beer gifted to us on New Years.

We also had a Magnum of champagne gifted to us on Thanksgiving.  I guess Magnums are the thing now, huh?  Thanks to Mark and Peter for the magnanimous gifting.

Now that the clipping from the magazine is safely preserved for eternity here on Mixed Meters, I've tossed the physical paper into the trash.  A very very small amount of empty space in my office has thus been created.

Here's an MM post with a picture of a skunk hunt.  Same deal - the picture got tossed in a cleanup after it was preserved in online pixels.

And here's another post called Desktop Stilllife - with pictures of cats and a video with music.