Purists should stick a cork in it – let’s raise a glass to the return of the pint bottle of champagne

Winston Churchill declared it the ‘ideal size’ for a boozy lunch and, until 50 years ago, it was a common way to sip your fizz. Harry Wallop, who once spent the day drinking like the wartime prime minster, says cheers to the proposed return of imperial measures for sparkling wine

Winston Churchill raises a glass to toast Marshal Tito at the Yugoslav embassy in Kensington 1953 (Alamy Stock Photo)

I am not an imperialist in either sense of the word, but I cheered this morning on learning that the government is to table legislation in the new year that will allow still and sparkling wine to be sold in pint-sized bottles for the first time in half a century.

This means pint-sized bottles of champagne, containing 568ml, will become a possibility once again. For many metric purists, this is an absurd idea and unnecessary, considering nearly all the winemakers of the world abide by the classic measures of 750ml and multiples (or divisions) thereof.

A pint bottle of champagne, however, was a common measure in the early and middle part of the 20th century, and one favoured by possibly the most famous champion of champagne: Winston Churchill, who declared a pint of sparkling wine was the ideal size – “enough for two at lunch and one at dinner”.

This sounds a typically Churchillian aphorism: neat, amusing and very possibly balderdash. How can you function properly, let alone run a country under the siege of Nazi bombs, when downing such huge quantities of alcohol?

So, a few years ago, I set myself the challenge of seeing if I could spend the day drinking what the grand old man consumed in a typical 24-hour period. Could I down all the whiskies, brandies, sherries and champagne Churchill consumed, while still doing the school run and holding down my job at a newspaper?

You may think this was hardly a very arduous journalist task, but it was one I undertook to genuinely try to unpick fact from fiction. As with so many aspects of the great man, his alcoholic intake is subject to a few myths, some burnished by Churchill himself in his lifetime.

Some hard facts, however, are available, not least from wine merchants’ invoices that hint at a gargantuan appetite for booze. After losing the 1945 election, he went on holiday to stay at Lake Como, with Sarah, his daughter, and Lord Moran, his doctor. Between them they polished off 96 bottles of champagne in a fortnight; Churchill also drank six or seven whisky and sodas a day, as well as three daily brandies. Pol Roger, his favourite champagne house, estimated that he had drunk an estimated 42,000 bottles throughout his life.

One thing is certain: he started his working day (often in bed) with what he called “mouthwash” – a weak whisky and soda, which he would keep continually topped up. But the whisky (simple Johnnie Walker, no fancy malt) would only just cover the bottom of the tumbler; the bulk of the drink was soda.

This, I discovered, was a rather delightful accompaniment to a morning’s work, not much more potent than a few espressos.

Lunch was when the serious drinking began. A whole bottle of champagne was the norm, invariably Pol Roger, a brand Churchill drank from at least 1908. His attachment was cemented in 1944, after meeting Odette Pol-Roger (the grand dame of the champagne house) at the British ambassador’s home in Paris, where the 1928 vintage was served in celebration of the liberation of France. She ensured he was never afterwards short of supplies.

A bottle, however, was one of these famous pint-sized ones, a measure that made up the majority of bottles sold in the UK until they were phased out by the French champagne houses (rather than the EU) in the 1970s. He would often drink it out of a silver tankard, still served this way in some St James’s gentlemen’s clubs. For me, 568ml of champagne was a celebratory rather than an absurd amount. Wonderful to enjoy, possibly, over one of those lunches between Christmas and new year when the only trivial pursuits need to be tackled, but hardly conducive to sharp thinking. The subsequent glass of Churchill’s beloved Hine cognac pushed me over the edge.

I was forced to slope off to bed for a nap, a fine Churchillian habit. He would often sleep for as much as an hour and a half in the afternoon.

This is where the real problems started. I slept through my alarm and left my bed two hours later blinking and groggy. The afternoon whisky and sodas had the opposite effect of the morning ones and made even basic work a trial.

By the time I got dressed for dinner (yes, I thought donning black tie was important, even though I had kids’ packed lunches to make), I was sozzled thanks to the preprandial sherry. Still coherent, but completely fuzzy-headed.

The next task was more champagne for dinner. I tucked into this second pint of the day with mounting joylessness, which I appreciate sounds churlish. This was because I was feeling increasingly bilious, which I later analysed as the effects of downing so much gassy soda and sparkling wine as much as the units of alcohol.

Shamefully, I failed to finish the full second pint of Pol Roger, let alone move on to the bottle of brandy. Churchill could demolish as much as two-thirds of a bottle as he commenced his most prolific part of the day – post-dinner writing. By this point, I could barely bash out a paragraph, let alone win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

My mission ended in complete failure. Partly, this was because I was not – as Churchill was – brought up in the Edwardian era when gentlemen drank pre-lunch whiskies and post-dinner cognacs as par for the course. I just didn’t have the training under my belt. But also because, as I discovered, my capacity for drinking on a working day is not that large.

Churchill is reputed once to have said: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” The opposite was the case with me.