--- title: Serving Alcohol and Wine in a Big Glass Makes You Drink More description: Drink too much? Blame your wine glass. Serving alcohol in a larger glass seems to make people drink more, finds a new study canonical: https://time.com/4358253/wine-alcohol-drinking-problem/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-06-06T23:00:07.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:30.991Z article:section: Health og:title: The Weird Thing That Makes You Drink More Wine og:description: Drink too much? Blame your wine glass. Serving alcohol in a larger glass seems to make people drink more, finds a new study og:url: https://time.com/4358253/wine-alcohol-drinking-problem/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt599bacb79586b8c3/69889683ab6d770eb46a9f5d/red-wine-glass.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4237 og:image:height: 2383 og:image:alt: red wine glass og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Weird Thing That Makes You Drink More Wine twitter:description: Drink too much? Blame your wine glass. Serving alcohol in a larger glass seems to make people drink more, finds a new study twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt599bacb79586b8c3/69889683ab6d770eb46a9f5d/red-wine-glass.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Weird Thing That Makes You Drink More Wine > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: Should I Drink Red Wine? [Watch (HLS stream): Should I Drink Red Wine?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/JLVLyuEq.m3u8) (1:35)  _Published 2015-03-12. Cheers to your health! All five of our experts give red wine a purple-stained smile._  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jun 6, 2016 11:00 PM UTC  A glass of red wine on a glass table with a blurred piano in the background A glass of red wine on a glass table with a blurred piano in the background Getty Images  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jun 6, 2016 11:00 PM UTC Next time you have trouble ordering just one red wine at the bar, blame your glass. A new study published in the journal _BMC Public Health_ finds that people drink substantially more wine when it’s served in a big glass. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England studied the wine sales at a local pub, The Pint Shop, for about five months last year. Every two weeks, the bar owners switched out the glasses between the restaurant’s standard size (300 ml), larger glasses (370 ml) and smaller ones (250 ml). Offering exactly the same amount of wine, but in a bigger glass, seemed to have a large effect on sales. When standard vessels were swapped for larger ones, vino sales went up 14.4% in the bar area and 8.2% in the restaurant portion of The Pint Shop. This isn’t the first study to show that containers play tricks on our brain. A 2015 [Cochrane review](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD011045.pub2/abstract) found that larger tableware increases how much people consume. But it is the first to look at alcohol—and the researchers have some interesting guesses into why a large glass leads to more rounds. One possibility: people may think they got stiffed on a pour. “There’s some evidence to suggest that people consume more rapidly when they perceive that there’s less,” says Professor Theresa Marteau, director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge and the study’s senior author. The illusion of a small pour could lead people to drink faster. Another theory is that people consume food and drink in units of one. “They think, ‘Oh, I’ll just one glass of wine, one slice of cake, one cup of coffee,'” Marteau says. When a wine portion looks meager, it may register as not a “full glass”—the perfect justification for another round. Or maybe people just really love big glasses. “People say the nose or the bouquet of the wine is greater in a large glass,” Marteau says. To find out for sure, the team is following up with more wine drinking experiments, in which they’re videotaping people drinking wine out of various glasses to compare drinking speed and satisfaction. 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