‘Give me strength?! No one has ever used wine in pint bottles….’
“Who cannot rejoice at the return of the pint of champagne, described by Winston Churchill as the perfect measure, being enough for two people at lunch and for one at dinner?” wrote Peter Hitchens in a recent column for the Mail Online.
The column attempted to rationalise the return of soon-to-be-available ‘pints’ of wine and champagne in Britain, while having a dig at so-called ‘metric commissars’ who, apparently, ‘loathe’ British traditions.
The government recently announced that a new 568ml bottle is set to appear in pubs, restaurants, clubs and on supermarket shelves very soon. Pint bottles of wine were sold in the UK before Britain joined the European Common Market and remained on shelves until 1973. Pints were famously said to be Winston Churchill’s favourite quantity of champagne, as Hitchens was quick to remind of.
In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2019, the former prime minister Boris Johnson said using the old imperial system (inches, miles, gallons, etc., instead of metres, kilometres, and litres, which hasn’t been in official use for decades), was an ‘ancient liberty.’
No longer having to conform to European rules about weights and measurements, the new legislation has been hailed as a victory among Brexiteers and the government, who argue the scrapping of ‘EU red tape’ will ‘boost winemaking by cutting costs and freeing the industry to innovate’ and is part of the country’s ‘new Brexit freedoms.’
‘Brexit bonus as winemaking costs slashed,’ splashed the Express.
The right-wing firebrand Peter Hitchens, who argued long before the EU referendum that Britain would be better off outside of it but did not vote in 2016 because he is critical of referendums, went a step further, devoting an entire column to how the new measures will ire backers of the metric system.
‘Let the return of champagne by the pint strike a blow against metric commissars who loathe our traditions,’ was Hitchens’ headline.
The rest of the column follows the same tone. “It will cheer anti-modernists, such as I, who loathe the chilly, rigid foreign measurements stealthily imposed on us over the past half-century, in place of our own familiar, human ones,” he continued.
The column was widely mocked, with many readers sharing their derision online.
“Give me strength?! No one has ever, ever used wine in pint bottles you utter blathering tool,” was one bemused comment.
Others found positives with the column, namely that it shows how desperate Brexiteers have become.
“Exasperating as this is, all of us hoping to rejoin must take heart at the blatant desperation. If pints of wine are being publicised by the Brexiteers as a tangible benefit, then you know they are finished. Yes, they will fight, point fingers and scream ‘betrayal’. Their client media will howl against conspirators – the remoaners, the civil service blob, the lefty do-gooder liberals etc who sabotaged the great national revival, but they are finished,” was another comment.
Others pointed to the irony of lecturing about British traditions while talking about champagne, a creation of the French.
“Beyond parody,” was one description.
How the new measurements will innovate the winemaking industry in Britain, as it is being sold by Brexiteers, remains unclear, and, indeed, whether any wine producers will opt into the new-old measurement.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward
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