Hi, have you ever wondered how much wine you are going to need for a party? Or ever wondered how much wine is in an actual serving? Stay tuned to find out!

Today we are talking about how much wine you will need for a party, what size bottles to buy and what is a proper serving size of wine when you are trying to figure out the math of how many bottles or how many glasses you will need for your guests.

Standard Wine Bottle Size

A standard wine bottle is 750 ml. and it gets a little bit confusing sometimes because in the wine and liquor measurement of packaging we are using the metric system – milliliters and liters. When people are talking about the standard serving sizes of wine they generally talk about ounces.

So to start there, a standard serving of wine is about four and a half to five ounces, some places would pour six. It kinda depends a little bit. Just for a frame of reference, this cup here is a five ounce glass. If it was full all the way up. You would see it in a glass like that which doesn’t really look like a lot. It should have been filled a little bit more but I don’t want to spill it all over the place. That would be a standard bottle of wine.

Typically what I find is when you are at somebody’s house, people tend to pour a little bit heavier especially if they are pouring it themselves. So the average that I find at a home setting is about four glasses of wine per a 750 ml bottle of wine. You can squeeze out five glasses if you are pouring them all at the same time, you can even get six glasses if you are portioning them out in one go. But generally I expect about four glasses of wine per a 750 ml bottle of wine. Unless you are using one of my glases – this is slightly bigger.

Larger Wine Sizes

The next size up is the 1.5 liter. So we go from 750 ml bottle to 1.5 liter which is exactly double. I said you can get about 4 glasses from the 750, so I usually bang out about 9 glasses out of a 1.5 liter. Again you might only get eight, you can get up to 10 or 11 even 12 if you are doing small pours.

So the next size up after the 1.5 liter bottle is typically three liters. These come in boxes, bag in box, as you’ve seen in the previous video. Some of the wineries are doing straight pouches now, foil aluminum type of thing. The three liter boxes as you can see on there they say that they have four 750 ml bottles of wine. So at that 4-5 glasses per bottle of the standard size bottle, we are looking at 16 to 20 servings out of one of these boxes. You might even get a little bit more depending on how big the pours are at your house.

After that we generally jump in to a five liter bag in box. There are also jugs in these sizes – 3L, 4L, 5L. But the boxes are a little more common these days. So a five liter box has six and 2/3 of a standard wine bottle. That would give you 27 to 35 servings of wine again depending on how big the serving is. When you look at the glass like mine, you might not get so many out of the box.

Calculating Wine Servings For a Party

So when you are calculating out for your guests if you are having a party or dinner, depending on what else you are serving and what your guests like to drink, the average, the typical, the standard is what people say is about two servings in the first hour of a gathering and about one glass every hour after that. So if you are having 10 people over for three hours you would calculate 10 times two in the first hour – 20 glasses and then another 10 and another 10, so 40 glasses of wine total. So you probably be looking at a five liter box and that might not get you through exactly, but you might count one or two of those people not having their full amount. It also depends on what type of gathering you are having and how close you know the people.

If you have close friends and family over they might feel comfortable pouring that second, third, fourth glass of wine. If you are entertaining some business colleagues, they might take it a little bit slower. Depends on what day of the week it is and what you are serving for food. Cocktail parties where you only have light appetizers – people tend to drink a little bit less. Whereas if you have full meal, they have more in their stomachs and they might have an extra drink or two.

So that’s it on the serving sizes of the wine and calculating out quantities you might need for a party. It is important to remember that taking in consideration depending on the beer and the alcohol situation the amounts will vary quite a bit, but at least now you should have an idea of how many servings you will get out of the different size bottles and of course it all depends on what size glass you are gonna be using. Thanks for joining us. We look forward for your feedback in the comments and we will see you soon. Cheers!

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