Will Drinking From Smaller Wine Glasses (Or Bottles) Reduce Your Wine Consumption?
New study says yes
Will using a smaller wine glass this holiday season (and beyond) help reduce the amount of wine you’re drinking? Certainly using smaller glasses is the advice I’ve given people before because there’s something about looking at a large glass with a small amount of wine that is unsatisfying and wine drop per drop has more than double the calories of Coca-Cola.
But commonly provided advice and evidence aren’t always the same thing, and when it comes to using smaller sized things and evidence, a bunch of it came from the contested and at times corrected research of Dr. Brian Wansink.
So I was pleased to see a new study coming out in albeit tepid support of the practice. The study, Impact of wine bottle and glass sizes on wine consumption at home: a within- and between- households randomized controlled trial had 260 households who reported consuming at least 2 bottles of wine per week randomly assigned to purchase either half or full sized bottles of wine or to drink regularly purchased wine from either 10oz or 12oz glasses and measure consumption for 2 weeks and then to swap to the other sized bottles or glasses and measure again.
Researchers found a small impact, whereby drinking from smaller bottles led to an average of 3.6% less wine consumed (just over half a cup worth per week per household) and drinking from smaller glasses led to an average of 6.5% less wine consumed (or roughly one cup per week per household).
Were these findings to hold over time, which is by no means a given, over a year the smaller bottles might lead a household to consume 7.5 fewer bottles of wine and the smaller glasses 15 fewer bottles of wine. And of course whether those decreases have any clinically meaningful impact to weight or health is also not a given.
Putting aside being unable to extrapolate from these very short terms findings to any longer term expectations or outcomes, I also wonder if this was the right study population? The population I’d love to see studied would be those who expressly were trying to drink less wine rather than all comers.
Wine wise, tbh it’s not really my thing, I prefer scotch, but nearly a decade ago a very kind patient brought me a special wine glass that does a great job of explaining another challenge with glasses and liquids - our eyes lie.