After all, at a dinner party, what’s the ratio of people admiring your Henri Jayer to people annoyed by how you keep talking about Henri Jayer? Meanwhile, you show up to that dinner with a 3-litre of anything and you are Dionysus, delivering a wine that they cannot imagine how you procured. You know that sad feeling at a restaurant when they put a single candle in a regular-sized dessert for someone’s birthday? That’s what your 75cl is like.
A giant-ass bottle of wine signals abundance. It screams ‘party’. When Jesus turned water into wine for that wedding, do you think it was one bottle? He abracadabra’ed more than 120 gallons of wine. Even if all of Cana was invited to that wedding, that’s about a quart of wine per Galilean. If Jesus came back to that party with a glass and a half, we’d all still be Jews.
A regular-sized bottle is the equivalent of four beers. If you show up to a dinner with four beers, you’re a dick. You’re saying, ‘I got myself covered.’ Four servings is like bringing half a cake. No one is excited about four servings. When people talk about four servings, they’re usually complaining about the unfairness of jury duty. With a huge bottle, everyone is drinking the same thing all night. This not only makes the meal more communal, but also eliminates the annoyance of people searching the table for a bottle they like and then saying, ‘I only drink Sancerre.’
Sure, there are challenges in bringing a large bottle. The main one is that someone will ask if your bottle is called a methuselah or a nebuchadnezzar or some other king of Israel. Luckily, this is precisely the kind of boring conversation that’s cured by a 3-litre bottle’s 370 grams or so of pure alcohol.
Opening a bottle larger than a magnum is a fun group activity. It’s actually no harder than opening a normal bottle, since the cork is the same size. But it looks like a project, thereby getting lots of dudes offering ideas for how to saw off the wax with power tools. Pouring a large bottle also looks harder than it is. Drinking it, however, is actually hard. I’ve mistakenly opened 6-litre bottles at both my son’s bar-mitzvah and a Passover, forgetting that you need gentiles to drink that much wine. I think I was fooled by that kings-of-Israel nomenclature.
But large-format bottles have an even more important function than impressing people at a party: impressing people in your wine cellar. When a half-drunk dinner guest follows me to my cellar to get more wine, it’s challenging to get them to notice the Château Lafite, no matter how many times I say, ‘Now, where’s that Château Lafite?’ But they always spot the 6-litre bottle of Château Cantemerle, because it’s lying on its side on a specially built wooden holder. It’s the pick-me girl of wine.
Cellaring large-format bottles is also smart because large bottles age more slowly. They’re also great long-term investments due to their rarity. These are things I tell my wife when I buy them and don’t at all believe.
Large bottles are so inviting that restaurants often display empty plastic versions given to them by wineries. Steakhouses don’t hang plastic T-Rex-sized ribeyes from the ceiling. Strip clubs don’t frame their entrances with 24-foot-tall blow-up dolls. Those would scare customers away. But huge wine bottles are inviting.
Are you going to get tired of drinking the same bottle of wine all night, hoping it finally pairs with one of the later courses? Are you overthinking this in the age of Instagram? Guests are going to take a selfie next to your bottle, and that’s more excitement than non-Decanter readers ever show about wine.
Every time I’ve left a party after bringing a 3- or 6-litre, my empty bottle has stayed behind. The hosts displayed that dead soldier in their house like a deer trophy. Is that worth paying extra for the liquid inside? I’m not sure. But I do know that it’s better than wasting the Jayer on those people.
In my glass this month
Did I get three cases of Barry Family Cellars, Cabernet Franc, Finger Lakes, New York 2024 (US$26 from the producer) because my brother-in-law Ian Barry made them? And did I ask him not to put labels on so I could put my own house wine label on it? Should you do the same and impress/annoy your dinner guests? Yes. This herbal, light, cold-climate red has enough acid to go with almost anything. And people will be amazed that you can make wine of this quality in New York State. Or at least that Ian can.
