Bring back the pint of wine – I can make sense of old measures

‘How,” said George VI to Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, “do you manage drinking during the day?” Churchill’s reply: “Practice.” And, of course, he was so right.

But there was another secret to his drinking, which was that he knew exactly how much to take. Specifically, the imperial pint for champagne.

For Churchill, “an imperial pint is an ideal size for a man like me. It’s enough for two at lunch and one at dinner. It pleases everyone.”

It amounted to a fourglass bottle, and I’d say myself that this is indeed the perfect quantity. It’s half-way between a half bottle and a full bottle: about enough to cheer you up, and just enough to share.

We shall all shortly be able to pace ourselves in pints of sparkling wine, now that the Rathfinny estate is to sell its blanc de noirs – which is really good – in pint bottles from next year. “It is such a perfect size… the great thing about the Sussex pint, as we’re calling it, is that it can ferment in this size bottle, so the quality is maintained,” the estate’s co-owner, Mark Driver, said happily.

The pint bottle was barred by Brussels in 1973 – one of those pointless bans that gave the European Union a bad name for prescriptive uniformity – in favour of 75cl or 37.5cl bottles. If milk could be sold in pint units, why not champagne?

Victoria Moore, this paper’s wine columnist, is all for its return. “What a great idea,” she said. “If it’s for a couple, you could have the pint as an aperitif. It’s more approachable than a full bottle.” It’s also a victory for Simon Berry, the retired partner of the wine merchant Berry Bros and Rudd, who campaigned for three decades for its return.

How we measure things matters. Magna Carta went out of its way to specify that “there is to be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom, and one measure of ale… namely the quarter of London.” I bet that was a heroic amount.

Obviously, when it comes to industrial production, the transition from imperial to metric made everyone’s life easier; feet and inches, pounds and stones were a nightmare to work with.

But on a human scale, when it comes to the measurements that most of us use all the time, non-metric measurements are far easier to get your head round.

I suppose there may be people out there who think of their weight in terms of kilos rather than stones, for example, but I just can’t: 11 stone is trauma; 65 kilos, meaningless. The very word stone says it all. As for babies, 10lb is just more impressive than 4.5 kilos.

When it comes to cooking, I can’t be alone in keeping two units in my head, grams and ounces. Some recipes just work better with one than the other.

The fundamental aspect of traditional measures is that they were built around the human form, chiefly the male form. An inch was said to be the size of a (big) man’s thumb, or three barley corns.

A hand – used for measuring horses – was indeed the size of a man’s hand; an acre the amount, apparently, that oxen could plough in a morning; a yard, or three feet, the size of a man’s stride.

Measuring things on a human or animal scale worked, because we can visualise it. A pound of apples was a handful; 500 grams doesn’t quite have the same effect.

So, make mine a pint. Champagne, not beer, thank you.