Uncommon bottle sizes

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Wine bottle sizes, like most other things in this frequently quixotic industry, are hard to categorize. Wikipedia shows 26 bottle sizes, but with tetra-packs, wine in a box and other non-standard packaging Snooth has close to 50 sizes in the database. Many of them may have fun names: piccolo, meaning small in Italian, for the 187.5ml tiny airplane sized bottle for example, but they play havoc with the concept of average prices. And this is why I’m writing this.

Before we modify how the average prices for a wine are calculated on the site, I’d like to turn it over to you to hear what would make the most sense to you.

If a wine is only available in Rehoboam and Methuselah (3 and 6 liters respectively) sizes, would you rather we calculated a theoretical average for the 750ml bottle based on standard conversion rates for bottles of that size, or should we just say something like “Price = $2,000, based on 3.0l bottle” and let you figure it out when you clicked through to see the individual bottle prices?

For the casual user the fact that we could calculate a theoretical 750ml price might be useful in quickly comparing different wines, as they’d all be forced to a common scale. However, for the collector, and especially for someone trying to value their cellar, this would prove to be a source of frustration.

Drop me an email and let me know your thoughts, or just leave a comment below. We’ll see whats popular and put that in place.