Largest Wine Bottles In The World

Does size matter? Of course size matters! To start, can you imagine a movie in which the role of a giant shark is played by a goldfish? Not the same, is it? Better yet, the movie King Kong played by Curious George? And what about the Grand Canyon? Calling it the Small Canyon just wouldn’t be the same. Oh and, ahem… The BIG bang? BOOM! Need I say more? As a rule, size has always had a massive appeal to humanity, apparently from day one. And that turned out pretty good, right? Anyway, I wouldn’t necessarily include wine in this “size matters” theory, and yet some people did. This resulted in some larger than life wine bottles. Therefore, I have prepared a fairly sizable list of the largest wine bottles in the world.

Largest Wine Bottles In The World

Number 1

Our first bottle is one I personally hold close to my heart, so much so that I own this bottle. You can see me holding it on the picture. It is far from being the largest bottle in the world but we have to start somewhere. This is a Methuselah Champagne bottle. It contains 6 liters which equals to 8 regular size bottles. That’s a LOT of Champagne… Well it would be if the bottle were full. Truth be told, this is actually a prop that I got from a studio after a shoot, and it is as empty as Aberdeen on a flag day. It decorates our front door along with 2 other bottles of similar sizes. The bottles are quite the attention getters and the start of some very interesting conversations. So this is a fake but our next bottle is sizably real!

Number 2

Nothing says big, bold, and heavy Cabernet like a 4.5 foot bottle of wine!

On July 29th 2004, Beringer Vineyards located 20 miles north of San Francisco, in partnership with Morton’s steak houses (to celebrate Morton’s 25th anniversary) have created the world’s largest wine bottle. Named Maximus, the bottle is a little over 4.5 feet tall (1.38 meters to be exact) and holds 130 liters, the equivalent of 173 bottles. That’s enough wine to fill more than 1,000 glasses. All you need is a crane to pour the wine… And one heck of a corkscrew! The Bordeaux-style bottle was filled with Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2001, and was eventually sold for $55,812 at an auction event to Wine Ventures, a wine and chocolate store in Tenafly, New Jersey.

To oversee the hand-blown bottle’s production, Beringer hired a Seattle-based glass artist named Charles Parriott. Patriott collaborated with Kavalier glassmakers in the town of Sazava in the Czech Republic to manufacture the giant bottle.

The bottle was entered in the Guinness World Records, only to be dethroned of its title a few years later.

Number 3

A few years later, Kavalier (featured above) went on to produce another world record breaking wine bottle for Templar Wine Cellars Čejkovice, a wine cooperative known as one of the top destinations in the Czech Republic. That new bottle measures a little over 6.5 feet (2.07 meters) and has a capacity of 200 liters – that’s about 266 regular size bottles… I don’t even think I have that many bottles in my own cellar! Due to its large size, the bottle had to be manufactured in four separate parts, using 2 glassmaking techniques. The four parts were then welded together.

But how does one drink the wine from a bottle of that size? When you think that big, you gotta be smart… Conveniently, a special tap was installed at the bottom of the bottle for pouring and cleaning purposes.

Number 4

Our nobel fourth is a sizable Shiraz coming from the Great Southern of Western Australia. On January 18th 2007, Wall Street traffic was stopped while a truck delivered a very special crate to the Cipriani Wall Street ballroom in the financial district of Manhattan, New York. The bottle was the centerpiece of a show featuring all things Australian, both culinary and cultural – part of a nationwide marketing effort dubbed “G’day USA: Australian Week”.  Kim Bullock, a wine store owner and wine bottle creator from Albany, Australia commissioned the bottle to be made in Germany, along with the cork, which was cut and hand carved from a tree in Portugal. Bullock spares no expense… According to the him, the fabrication cost for the cork alone was $3,500, the label was $1,500 including design and print, and the carrying case $7,500!

The 6.5 feet tall bottle holds nearly 290 liters of wine, that is 387 regular bottles of Shiraz. Not too shabby but I bet we can do better than that.

Number 5

Coming in number 5 is a wine bottle that contains no less than 640 regular size bottles. A standard bottle of wine is 750ml, or 25 fluid ounces, and should yield about 5 glasses of wine. So, if you do the math, that bottle will net you 3200 glasses of wine! Truly everything about the world record bottle is spectacular. It measures 240 cm with a diameter of 68 cm, and a bottle thickness of 1 cm. The bottle was filled with 480 liters of Grande Cuvee TBA NV No.7 2005, a Chardonnay blend from Austria’s Burgenland region, only 20 miles south of Vienna.

The proud owner of this colossal bottle, Austrian winemaker Alois Kracher, offered the bottle to the small Swiss town of Rehetobel, where it has been on display since 2007.

Wine bottles keep breaking world records one after another… And if you think we can’t possible top this last record, keep reading!

Number 6

January 2010 in Shenyang, China, the 1850 liter bottle from Wang Chen Wines in Liaoning sets a new world record! Nearly four times the previous record holder (number 5 above).

The bottle is 15 feet high and contains an eye-watering 1850 liters of wine, a little more than 2466 regular size bottles. The size of the bottle is so unbelievably large, a special mount had to be built for convenience and pouring purposes. We’re talking 1.8 tons just with the wine alone! While the average wine bottle can be held with just one hand, this one needs two adults with open arms to reach around it. Wang Cheng, with the support of the Shenyang Food Industry Office, produced the bottle in honor of the Shenyang Food Festival, which took place early that year.

And the wine? It’s ice wine, a specialty of China’s northeast regions. Other destinations such as Canada, British Columbia in upstate New York, and Germany also produce ice wine. Cold temperatures and late harvests are required to reach the sweet and beautifully concentrated flavors ice wine is known for. According to my research, the conditions in Shenyang provide the ideal soil and weather patterns for the grapes to be made into ice wine.

I’ve never tasted ice wine and I have no idea how good that one tasted but a giant bottle on a giant swing would definitely help kick off a pretty great party, if nothing else.

Number 7

Coming in last but not certainly not least, the world’s largest wine bottle as of today (according to the Guinness World Records) wasn’t made by one of the famous champagne wineries or the oldest and most exclusive vineyards in Italy or France. Unveiled in 2014, the colossal bottle was the brainchild of a car importer from Switzerland called André Vogel who commissioned the bottle to celebrate the opening of a new branch of his business.

The bottle is 13.68 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter, and can hold a staggering 3094 liters of wine, the equivalent of 4125 standard 750ml bottles. I don’t know if the bottle is actually filled with wine, and my guess is it isn’t. If I’m right, would this marketing prop deserve the title of the World’s Largest WINE Bottle? Seriously, who wants an empty bottle of wine, regardless of its size, am I right?

So What Else Is Notoriously Big?

There is one more sizable item worth mentioning… I’m talking about a Champagne flute. According to the World Guiness Records, the largest wine flute was filled with 100.5 liters (26.54 US gal) of sparkling wine and was achieved by Centro Empresarial e Cultural de Garibaldi in Brazil, on 3 February 2014. It took 134 bottles of sparkling wine from Cooperativa Vinícola Garibaldi to fill the flute. Is it just me or is everyone getting a straw?

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