It's not the vino talking, your wine glass has grown bigger

You may want to gaze at your wine glass this Christmas and contemplate a sobering fact: the size of wine glasses has increased almost seven times in the past 300 years.

A new study suggests this may be encouraging people to drink more. "The rising levels of drinking may be partly due to the growing size of wine glasses," researchers report in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.

They collected measurements for 411 glasses in England, dating from 1700 to 2017, and found capacity had risen from an average of 66ml in 1700 to 449ml in 2017.

The Cambridge University team said: "Wine drinking rose almost fourfold during 1960-80 and almost doubling again during 1980-2004."

In South Africa, domestic sales of wine rose to 436.9 million litres last year, up from 425million litres in 2015, even though domestic wine production went down. SA Wine Industry statistics from June 2017 also showed an increase in exports.

Wine connoisseur Michael Fridjhon said: "Increased consumption figures are the result of more people discovering the joy of wine, mainly at the expense of hard tack."