Did I catch a snipe?
I was retrieving Big Blue from the curb yesterday when I spotted something down at street level: clear plastic, evidently smashed flat at some point.
The item: an empty bottle that had once contained Barton Vodka, which the manufacturer helpfully describes as “an inexpensive vodka, made to satisfy expensive tastes.” Reasonable enough. What disturbed me was the volume: this bottle held a whole 200 ml of the stuff, about 6¾ ounces. A quick bit of Googlage to see if this was a standard size or something peculiar to the Wino-American culture turned up 200-ml bottles of Moët et Chandon at the wonderfully-named Booze.ie, and I figure, you can’t get much more legit than Moët, though their bottle looks nothing like Barton’s, which appears to emulate a pocket flask.
And apparently there’s a standard wine bottle even smaller than this: the “piccolo,” something you find only in Champagne, is a quarter of the standard 750-ml bottle, or a mere 187.5 ml. Some folks call it a snipe. Me, I’m just wondering about the guy who bought this piddling amount of vodka in the first place.
T Town Tommy »
26 November 2008 · 6:26 pm
Before now I thought a split was the smallest size. On the other end of the official sizes they have the “Nebuchadnezzar” at 15 liters and about $2,000.00 US.
John Owen Butler »
27 November 2008 · 11:46 am
A gutter-snipe?
John Owen Butler »
27 November 2008 · 11:47 am
Or rather, a guttered-snipe.