Bringing out the big guns

Present someone with a magnum of champagne and you are sure to get warmer thanks than if it were a bottle or even two, for that matter. But why? It sounds huge but it is only a double-size, holding 1.5 litres or two standard 750ml bottles. Yet the very word magnum conjures up extravagance and excessive largesse - much more than the actual reality.

It does not stop there. A container big enough to hold four bottles is a jeroboam, one holding six, a rehoboam. The biblical-sounding methusulah holds eight. There are 12 in the exotically named salamanazar, while the mammoth balthazar holds 16 bottles.

And when they wheel in the hefty nebuchadnezzar, you have 20 bottles of the bubbly, an instant party.

These names are traditionally reserved for champagne. When the outsize bottles hold still wine, the names vary slightly. But it seems they have bent the restrictions a bit in recent years.

Attend a chic charity wine auction, and you will notice few of the really big money lots are normal-sized bottles. Some vineyards have theirs individually hand-painted by famous artists. Others prefer their bottles to be hand-etched or hand-blown to attract buyers. Even magnums have become rather humdrum in these circles.

Today's vintners offer their sparkling wine, cabernets and chardonnays in double magnums, jeroboams, imperiales - boasting an impressive eight - or even the monster sizes mentioned above, previously the exclusive domain of champagne, but adopted by still wine producers.