Telling your jeroboams from your salmanazars
Pity the nascent “man at his best” who fumbles one of the crucial signifiers of sophistication just when love’s labours or the protocols of business are close to glad fruition. Who hasn’t “blown the closer” with an incorrectly pronounced French phrase or a tactless bathroom joke? For many who’ve deftly simulated class and charm through the dread minefields of conversation, the tipping point occurs at the tippling point, when ordering an inappropriate quantity of bubbly reveals the would-be big shot as a crass dolt. Circumstance will dictate the amount of alcohol required, so in order to shore up your savvy I offer a list of the names assigned to sizes of Champagne bottles, in ascending order.
(A bit of history on each is included, to be casually mentioned during the pour, lending a note of offhand erudition to the entire sordid ruse. I will list the quantity of each in liters, followed by the name of the bottle and its derivation.)
0.375L: Split or Pony
“Split” is what you gotta do, man, when the time comes, dig? It’s also the battle cry of a little-known version of “Captain Marvel” circa 1966, whose body parts would fly off in different directions so that the fingers could poke guys in the eye while the feet were kicking other guys in the balls.
“Pony” is a character in Eric Bogosian’s play Suburbia as well as a dance popular in the Hullabaloo era. All these things — beatniks who leave early, that superhero, that play, and that dance — are half-assed, thus it applies to a half bottle of champagne.
0.75L: Bottle
This is the least imaginative of the bottle-size names, which is why it’s the most popular. By way of illustration:
“Where are you from?”
“Around.”
“What do you listen to?”
“Music.”
“What’ll you have?”
“A bottle.”
See? It’s best to skip this one, as there is no way to suavely convey that you’re ordering a “bottle” …not just a “bottle.”
1.5 L: Magnum
A private dick, played by Tom Selleck on CBS; very big in the 1980s, very popular with the ladies. Therefore, the standard “show-off” quantity, always welcome if a tad “Reagan Era.”
3.0 L: Jeroboam
Israelite king who waged bitter war with...
4.5 L: Rehoboam
...despite (or because?) of the similarly doofy names. But why did the “battle o’ the ’boams” inspire these designations for bottles? Well, imagine yourself drinking three liters of Korbel and your archenemy (and if you don’t have one, you’re living wrong) downing four-and-a-half liters of same. An inevitable brawl of biblical proportions.
6.0 L: Methuselah
Oldest man ever! Died at 969 years, in the year of the flood. Consider the related idiomatic expressions, “he’s old as Methuselah” and “Ain’t seen him since the year of the flood” ...two cliches plus a hell of a party. And remember Ira Gershwin’s take on Methuselah’s longevity: “Who calls that livin’ when no gal will give in to no man what is nine hunderd years!” Drink up, Pops.
9.0 L: Salmanazar
Assyrian king who combined the religion of Israel with local pagan faiths, creating a notable early example of the “moral relativism” and “mix-n-match religion” that purists and orthodox sorts decry. What better way to toast your impurity and impiety than with a ridiculously huge bottle of booze?
12.0 L: Balthazar
This is one of the Magi of Christmas creche fame. Your three wise men. According to some exhaustive Bible “who’s who” website I was nice enough to consult:
“The traditional names adopted in the West are Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The Syrian tradition uses the names Gushnasaph, Hormisdas and Larvandad. Others use Hormizdah, Perozdh and Yazdegerd, or Basanater, Karsudan and Hor, or various other names.”
So why Balthazar? As we’ll see, Melchior gets a bottle named after him, but not Gaspar (How come? Read on). But be glad that we need not order a “Larvandad” or… yikes… a “Gushnasaph” on New Year’s Eve. Of course, I will not stoop to making jokes about a “Hor full of wine.” That’s the kind of reflexive yobbery of which I am trying to cure you.
15.0 L: Nebuchadnezzar
Probably the baddest of your ancient kings, this time reigning o’er the land of Babylon. Which should give him the jumbo-est of all bottles, but no. Instead he replaces wise man Gaspar (not to be confused with ‘Wiseman, Fred,’ a guy who makes documentaries ). “Neb,” son of kick-Assyrian Nabopolassar, eventually paid for persecuting three upright Hebrews in a fiery furnace by suffering “lycanthropy.” His hair was perfect.
18.0 L: Melchior
OK, this is the other wise man. I can only surmise that he gets pride of place for bringing gold to baby Jesus. Obviously, that’s the gift that keeps on giving, but what of frankincense and myrrh? Ponder this little nugget about Balthazar’s gift, myrrh, which I found in my exhaustive research for this important piece: “...an aromatic juice of a shrub called the Cistus or rock rose, which has the same qualities, though in a slight degree, of opium.” So: gold… opium… and INCENSE? Guess why Gaspar was excluded from the wine-tasting party! All mysteries are answered in the fullness of time.
25.5 L: Sovereign
Once the most ubiquitous gold coin in British circulation, coin collectors scorn these nickel-sized bits of change as too common. So they are worth only the value of the gold itself. You think “worth its weight in gold” is a compliment? Then you are no numismatist, and philately will get you nowhere. Now, twenty-five-and-a-half liters of champagne is just way too much. Foster Brooks, Shane MacGowan and Boris Yeltsin couldn’t have put all that away with Judy Garland’s help. So really, the regal name accorded this super-size serving of the stuff is a lot of piffle.
Next month we’ll take up narcotics! ◊
SPORT MURPHY co-authored the book Everything’s Coming Up Profits. He enjoys habitat dioramas and “mild” Slim Jims, and is completing his fourth album, a multimedia behemoth entitled A Room of Voices.
