The $3,500 Dumangin rosé Champagne bottle stood so tall that it nearly reached my hip. I’m 5-foot-11 on a good day—and this was a good day.
I had been in search of a giant bottle of wine, and they’re not easy to come by. Greg Stokes had a small collection in Columbus, Ohio, just miles from my home. His store, Accent Wine, more closely resembles a swanky modern art gallery than your neighborhood wine seller, where bottles are displayed like something tantalizingly cool. Some of the giant wine is available for purchase, but others are just empty bottles, kept on display simply because of how giant they are. The 15-liter Champagne bottle was sitting in a wooden case in the angled window at the front of his shop. He had custom ordered the bottle for his wedding in 2021. Large-format wine “is all about creating a feeling,” Stokes told me, especially when it comes to Champagne. “When you do it in this big, grandiose way, it becomes even more celebratory.”
The reason for my giant wine hunt was several hundred miles away in Tallahassee. In March, the Florida Legislature passed a law legalizing enormous bottles of wine, overturning a regulation that had been on the books since 1939. The vote was nearly unanimous, with members of both major political parties seeing no reason to keep such a strange prohibition in place. So, until July 1, it was illegal to sell bottles of wine over 1 gallon (3.8 liters) in the Sunshine State. Now red-blooded Floridians can freely purchase 4.5-, 6-, 9-, 12-, and 15-liter bottles if their hearts desire. (Curiously, these bottle sizes are named for biblical figures: Jeroboam, Methuselah, Salmanazar, Balthazar, and Nebuchadnezzar, respectively.)
The beer, wine, and spirits industries are tightly regulated, full of archaic Prohibition-era laws encouraging temperance and discouraging overconsumption. (Alcohol, though it comes in many delicious liquid concoctions, is a toxin.) But many of them also feel arbitrary and outdated. And this law was particularly strange: Most people I spoke to had no idea how a rule prohibiting the sale of giant wine, which has been allowed outside Florida, had ended up on the books in the first place.
The rule’s unknown origin—and outlier status among wine laws elsewhere—didn’t stop its reversal from becoming a libertarian victory. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, even held a bill-signing ceremony at Wine Watch, a Fort Lauderdale wine store, to commemorate the event, spun by the governor as a triumph over “needless regulation.”
“We want our businesses to thrive. We want our consumers to be happy. And if that means they want to buy and sell a big ol’ bottle of wine like this, by golly, they’re gonna be able to do that in the state of Florida,” DeSantis told the crowd, a sign reading “Carpe Vinum” adorning the lectern at which he spoke. What took Florida so long to embrace giant wine—and how, exactly, is anyone supposed to pour a glass from one of those glorious monstrosities?
Nick Walters, a sommelier at the three-Michelin-star New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park, said he believes strongly in the communal nature of wine. “I am a big believer that a 750-milliliter bottle of wine is the perfect sharing size for two people,” Walters said. A large bottle is a way to extend that same experience to a larger group. “It’s the liquid form of breaking bread with one another. You’re all sort of taking a piece of the same loaf.”
Still, these bottles are mostly novelty items, spectacles of opulence and overindulgence. You can find them filling up champagne towers on a cruise ship or at a ritzy black-tie gala, or spraying the winners of a Formula 1 race. While magnums (1.5-liter bottles) are easy to come by, the larger you get, the rarer the bottle. Truly enormous bottles are usually reserved for Champagnes or high-end Bordeaux. The wine professionals I spoke to for this story all told me that large-format wines are almost always bought for specific special occasions or, especially when it comes to the larger of the large formats, by private collectors, who often custom-order them from wineries or even purchase them at auction.
“It’s the McMansion of wine,” Amanda Neville, a wine store owner in Brooklyn, New York, told me. Her store, Tipsy, typically stocks some magnums and double magnums of bubbly each December, when neighborhood customers are looking for something eye-popping to bring to holiday parties or events, but even those items she doesn’t sell year-round.
Paul Hart, the CEO of Hart Davis Hart Auction Co., said that large bottles have always been part of the auction business. Occasionally, the company will sell to restaurants or businesses, but it usually sells to individuals. “Certain private collectors do a lot of entertaining,” he said. And the ones that like big bottles of wine really like big bottles of wine. “Once you open one, you’re after them.” In October, the auction house sold two 15-liter bottles of Château Lynch-Bages Bordeaux—a 2005 for $4,183 and a 2008 for $3,585—as well as a 6-liter bottle of 1982 Château Latour Bordeaux for $19,120, to name just a few.
There’s spectacle not only in the appearance of a many-liter bottle but also in the logistics of how they are handled before they reach the customer. “Only 750-milliliter bottles, which is the standard size, and magnums can be made on an automated bottling line,” said Andrew Walleck, COO of the online retail platform Wine Access. “Everything bigger than that has to be hand-filled, hand-filtered, and the cork has to be hammered in by hand.”
Next comes the hassle of getting a bottle the size of a small child to its destination. “Imagine you’re shipping a grandfather clock,” he said. “That’s the level of pain-in-the-ass-ery.” Wine Access occasionally sells large-format wines, but that’s a “totally bespoke” process when that happens; Walleck says the procedure often involves receiving bottles in large wooden crates from wineries, crowbarring them open, repacking them extra tightly, placing them between two wooden pallets, binding them snugly, and making sure they’re “as secure as a brick shithouse.”
After a giant bottle reaches its destination, it needs to be properly stored—as all wine must—though extra space is needed in any warehouse or wine cellar for these big fellas. Then there’s the issue of actually pouring the things.
“Once you get above 6 liters, you’re really talking about something that is either too cumbersome or impossible for most people to pour tableside in a graceful way,” Walters said. Instead, his team typically opens the bottle with a standard key and pours it—a multiperson job—into decanters. “Let’s say you have 15 liters of Bordeaux. You might open the bottle up, pour it into a bunch of different magnum decanters, and then you can pour around the room from the decanter and display the bottle.”
Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images
Another option: Turn the bottle of wine into a keg of sorts. When Lisa Mattson, a wine marketing consultant, was working as the creative director of Jordan Vineyard & Winery in California’s Sonoma County, the winery, which routinely makes large-format bottles of its own, dispatched a company called WineKeeper to create a custom tap system that screws into the top of the bottle. The system connects to a bottle of nitrogen, which allows the wine to flow through a spout at the push of a small lever.
“Consumers want excitement and entertainment,” Mattson told me. “They don’t just want the old way of enjoying wine.” She and her husband even host a wine party at their home every summer, and her friends—most of whom work in the wine industry—each bring a big bottle (though not the biggest of the big bottles). When it comes to serving the wine, “we all have to take turns because it weighs on you to be pouring about 6 liters of Champagne,” she said. For this year’s event, which took place in August, she had so much extra from years past that she told guests not to bring any more. They were all set.
Luckily, keeping bubbly wine around works better when the bottle is larger. You can’t keep a standard bottle of sparkling wine around for years. But a large-format bottle can present a more favorable ratio of oxygen to wine, letting air in more slowly relative to the bottle’s size, says Alison Morris Roslyn, a journalist turned sommelier who runs the consultancy Francey Not Fancy, and allowing it to age more gradually.
“There’s a lot of benefits to aging Champagne. It gets kind of yeasty and bready, and it gets all these really interesting flavors,” said Elizabeth Schneider, a sommelier and host of the podcast Wine for Normal People. “The problem is, if you age it in a 750-milliliter bottle, it’s not gonna have effervescence and it can get flat.”
One big danger, though, is with the cork. “If you buy a case of wine and one cork is bad, you still have 11 good bottles,” said Morris Roslyn. “If you buy a Neb and the cork is bad, you’ve ruined 20 bottles.”
That’s a minor drawback, though. Huge bottles are allowed in Ohio, where I lived, Virginia where I recently moved, and everywhere from New York to Alabama to California. No one I asked could think of another state where they are currently banned. What was Florida so afraid of?
In March 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh off bowing out of the race for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, hailed the passage of the new law allowing big wine to be sold in Florida as a victory against Big Government. Sticking it to Big Government, trimming fat, and reducing bureaucracy are perennial tenets of the Republican Party platform. But the bill took years to pass through the Legislature. (It was stymied in part by lobbying efforts by Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the large Florida-based beverage distributor. Representatives of Southern Glazer’s did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Slate, but the company’s wine division president has told local news that he supports the final version of the bill.)
Rep. Chip LaMarca, a Republican from Broward County, sponsored the bill. He said he felt that legalizing large wine was a “free-market issue” for him and he was uncomfortable with the consequences of violating the law. “The penalties for this were: It was a misdemeanor, the first offense. The second one was a third-degree felony. I mean, you have a legal substance in a larger bottle than normal, and you’re—you’re telling me that somebody can actually end up with a criminal record because of it?”
When it finally went for a vote earlier this year, only one person in either house dissented: Sen. Clay Yarborough, a Republican from Jacksonville. LaMarca called Yarborough a “longtime friend” who is “opposed to anything dealing with alcohol.”
The National Federation of Independent Business lobbied in support of the new big-bottle law. Tim Nungesser, the NFIB’s Florida legislative director, called the existing law “regulatory nonsense,” especially in a state with such a large wedding, event, and tourism scene.
Andrew Lampasone, who owns Wine Watch, the store where DeSantis held his press conference, said he anticipates that it’ll be the largest retailer of big bottles in the state. He has been collecting the bottles for some time, actually. “It’s kinda like Cuban cigars,” he told me. “You know, once you get them here, there’s no law against owning a Cuban cigar, but you’re not allowed to bring it into the country, you know?”
Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that the old law was stupid, but no one—not even LaMarca—could tell me why big bottles were illegal in the first place. (LaMarca, for his part, picked up the cause from Florida Rep. Danny Perez, who became the Florida House speaker in November and who first introduced the bill in 2019. Perez did not respond to requests for comment on why he had introduced the bill.)
Most alcohol laws are designed to either break up the control of industry (such as laws preventing liquor producers from directly selling their own products to consumers) or prevent overconsumption. If anything, this seemed to fall into the latter camp, but let’s be honest: It just didn’t seem likely that in 1939, six years after Prohibition ended nationwide, Florida would institute a ban on giant bottles of wine because people were getting hammered off them.
My answer finally came in a newspaper clipping from Sunday, April 30, 1939. The Bradenton Herald, which served the Gulf Coast city just south of Tampa, ran a piece headlined “Liquor Dealers Hand Lawmakers 5-Point Program,” written by Howard W. Hartley. The article details a series of policy demands that the state’s alcohol sellers placed on the Legislature. The retailers wanted clubs to be able to sell liquor only “by the drink.” Their other requests: a rule to prohibit producers from bypassing wholesalers and selling directly to retailers, a rule to establish a new license for selling wine and premade cocktails, and for the excise tax on liquor to be reduced from $1.20 a gallon to 80 cents a gallon. Hartley wrote that the introduction of the bills and their referral to the legislative temperance committees were “followed by howls of protests” from roadside restaurants and barbecue joints who would need a separate wine license under the law.
There was one more proposal: “to require the sale of wine in individual containers of not more than one gallon in order to prevent dilution in previously used containers.” That is, the liquor dealers didn’t want anyone buying a giant bottle of wine, then rebottling it themselves.
I sent the article to Brad Berkman, a beverage lawyer at the Florida-based firm Greenspoon Marder, and Joseph Spillane, a history professor at the University of Florida who is a past president of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Neither was familiar with the origins or rationale of the law before I sent them the story.
Berkman said that the article implies that “retailers weren’t lobbying to prevent consumers from buying large bottles. They were lobbying to prevent large-size bottles from being opened and poured into smaller containers for sale.” (The new law seems to prevent this, anyway, Berkman noted. It reads: “Wine sold or offered for sale by a licensed vendor to be consumed off the premises shall be in the unopened original container.”)
Spillane said he thinks it was “part of a larger effort to keep retail establishments from turning into quasi-wholesalers.” There was, in those days, “a near-constant battle between producers, wholesalers, and retailers to make sure one wasn’t gaining unfair advantage on the others.” He put it bluntly: “There is no regulatory history in the U.S. weirder than that of alcohol.”
Christian Slupe, the COO of Lakeridge Winery & Vineyards in Clermont, Florida, spent years lobbying for the bill and spoke at the press conference with DeSantis. He told me that the law was a “very unnecessary barrier” to the state’s entire wine industry. In October, I had the chance to swing by the winery, which is nestled directly between downtown Orlando and The Villages, the famed city-state for central Florida retirees. It’s the largest winery in the state. His grandfather became a fan of big bottles of wine during his travels to France and desperately wanted to bring them to Lakeridge. Slupe is hoping to start selling big bottles as soon as early 2025. It won’t be a big part of the business, but it will be meaningful to him nonetheless. Indeed, to my right when I walked into the winery’s main retail and tasting room, on a counter, sat a preview of the future: a bottle of Lakeridge’s cabernet sauvignon. Ridiculous, yes. But perhaps worth celebrating.
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