Abstract
The history of wine-drinking is a history of excess. From Noah’s disastrous first
experiments and the bacchanalia of the ancient Greeks to the spectacular overindulgence
described in the diaries of Evelyn Waugh, the consumption of wine to
excess has been a recurrent theme among those drink and those who write about it.
Sometimes the quantities consumed by the drinkers of the past are staggering.
According to Roy Porter’s English Society in the Eighteenth Century, ‘to gain a
reputation as a blade one had to be at least a three-bottle man. Sheridan, Pitt the
Younger, and the Greek scholar Porson were all said to be six-bottle men’. One
cannot help wondering whether they meant the same by ‘bottle’ as we do...