Pint of wine anyone? UK looks to bring back ‘silly measure’

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨GreyShuck@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨unitedkingdom@feddit.uk⁩

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/27/pint-of-wine-anyone-uk-looks-to-bring-back-silly-measure

The poet Robert Burns imagined a man toasting his lover with a “pint o’ wine”, and Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous proponent of the pint bottle for champagne. Now, Rishi Sunak’s government has spied a “Brexit opportunity” to legalise the sale of wine by the pint once more – if it can persuade anyone to make the bottles.

Still and sparkling wine will be sold in 200ml, 500ml and 568ml (pint) sizes in 2024, alongside existing measures, under new rules, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) announced on Wednesday. It said the change was made possible by Brexit.

However, the pint-sized move appeared to be the extent of a push towards imperial measures, after a government consultation into allowing more businesses to buy and sell using them resulted in no new action.

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Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
helps nobody

anachronistic

nobody asked

Must be a special sort of day ending in ‘y’
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- funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  take the cheapest plonk
  
  sell it in a pint bottle
  
  call it “Blue Passports are Here Again”
  
  picture of Winston Churchill getting noshed off by the Queen
  
  Yorkie-esque “not for girls” campaign but "not for Johnny Foreigner"
  
  profit
  
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  - Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I will barf
    
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Lifebandit666@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How about stop coming up with another way of selling me alcohol and just start selling weed by the eighth?

Stop fucking around you cunts.

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- Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ll have a pint of marijuana, my good fellow!
  
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prime_number_314159@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Why have laws restricting bottles of wine to specific sizes in the first place? Surely as long as it’s labeled clearly it’s sufficiently easy to know what you’re getting.

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- hellothere@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Surely as long as it’s labeled clearly
  
  And therein lies the issue, how clear is clear?
  
  For example, if someone managed to get hold of bottles with slightly thicker glass, you could sell a bottle of wine with slightly less wine in than is obvious from the outside, increasing the price per mililitre by a few percent. Not much individually, but it all adds up over the year.
  
  If you’re buying that wine, and looking at a shelf of near identical looking shapes and sizes of bottle, you’re already factoring in grape, flavour, price per 750ml, provinence, alcohol content, etc, so what benefit do you get from one bottle being 750ml, and another being 736ml?
  
  Standardisation simplifies manufacturing (of bottles) as well as purchasing of the end product by consumers. There is no benefit to an overly wide selection of sizes.
  
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  - somethingsnappy@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There are plenty of variable thickness bottles for other kinds of alcohol. It still has to hold 750ml of liquid if that is the volume of the spirit. It would be easier to water things than pass off an incorrect volume.
    
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  - RecallMadness@lemmy.nz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why don’t we apply these rules to all things? Why just milk and booze?
    
    Weights and measures act, appendix 4.2.0 part 3, section 2: chicken nuggies.
    
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  - anothermember@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    And therein lies the issue, how clear is clear?
    
    For example, if someone managed to get hold of bottles with slightly thicker glass, you could sell a bottle of wine with slightly less wine in than is obvious from the outside, increasing the price per mililitre by a few percent. Not much individually, but it all adds up over the year.
    
    If you’re buying that wine, and looking at a shelf of near identical looking shapes and sizes of bottle, you’re already factoring in grape, flavour, price per 750ml, provinence, alcohol content, etc, so what benefit do you get from one bottle being 750ml, and another being 736ml?
    
    Standardisation simplifies manufacturing (of bottles) as well as purchasing of the end product by consumers. There is no benefit to an overly wide selection of sizes.
    
    That sounds like a case for restricting the thickness of glass bottles rather than restricting the volume of liquid. How would switching to pints make any difference with that? As long as they’re labelled correctly I don’t see much problem.
    
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  - EinfachUnersetzlich@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The shelf-edge labels are already required to give the price per 100ml or per litre.
    
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mannycalavera@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What a fantastic example of a guardian article:

Brexit outrage,

The minor reforms to wine measures are optional.

Buried in the middle as a throw away comment.

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- scrchngwsl@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But of course it’s optional? I don’t understand why it’s scandalous that they’ve put that in the middle? Did you want it in the headline?
  
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  - mannycalavera@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The headline implies that these silly measurements are being brought back on a wider scale than what they are and it doesn’t mention they’re optional until a few paragraphs in. So yes I did want the headline to be more realistic of the situation and less misleading.
    
    So consider why they couldn’t have written the headline as:
    
    UK government quietly drops Imperial measurement plan but allows wine and champagne to be sold in pints.
    
    That’s pretty close to what the headline was on Sky news on their rolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. But that wouldn’t generate the clickbait I suppose.
    
    Like I said, I saw this article and was watching the morning news at the same time and they seemed to imply two completely different stories. But instead the guardian had added it’s own spin to the story and headline.
    
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- ReCursing@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Honestly I see it as more as point-and-laugh than outrage
  
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Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t see what’s wrong with allowing imperial measurements tbh. Most places by now are well accustomed to Metric that I don’t see businesses suddenly switching to Imperial.

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autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Still and sparkling wine will be sold in 200ml, 500ml and 568ml (pint) sizes in 2024, alongside existing measures, under new rules, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) announced on Wednesday.

However, the pint-sized move appeared to be the extent of a push towards imperial measures, after a government consultation into allowing more businesses to buy and sell using them resulted in no new action.

A consultation said the government was looking at the change in order to “capitalise on the benefits of Brexit”, citing the “totemic” metric martyrs court cases against traders who refused to switch to grams and kilograms.

In undercover footage, he was filmed with a pint of pale liquid – identified by some people, almost certainly erroneously, as wine – while appearing to negotiate his fee to advise on transfers.

Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for enterprise, markets and small business, said, apparently seriously, that “our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this, where we can seize new opportunities and provide a real boost to our great British wineries and further growing the economy.

“Instead of fixing the crisis in our NHS, cleaning up our rivers and tackling crime, this Conservative government has been spending its time developing plans to introduce a new bottle of wine size.

The original article contains 921 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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