Capacities of

wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

casks were formerly measured and standardised according to a specific system of

English units English units were the units of measurement used in England up to 1826 (when they were replaced by Imperial units), which evolved as a combination of the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Roman units of measurement, Roman systems of units. V ...

. The various units were historically defined in terms of the wine gallon so varied according to the definition of the gallon until the adoption of the Queen Anne wine gallon in 1706. In the United Kingdom and its colonies, the units were redefined with the introduction of the imperial system in 1826, whilst the Queen Anne wine gallon was adopted as the standard US

gallon The gallon is a unit of volume in British imperial units and United States customary units. The imperial gallon (imp gal) is defined as , and is or was used in the United Kingdom and its former colonies, including Ireland, Canada, Australia ...

in 1836. The major wine producing countries use barrels extensively and have developed standards at variance with the traditional English volumes: examples include a

hogshead A hogshead (abbreviated "hhd", plural "hhds") is a large Barrel (storage), cask of liquid (or, less often, of a food commercial Product (business), product) for manufacturing and sale. It refers to a specified volume, measured in either Imperial ...

of , a barrique of (Bordeaux), a barrel of (Australia), a barrel of (Burgundy) and a puncheon of .

Casks

Tun

The tun (, ,

Middle Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It was also the administrative language in the former Roman Provinces of Mauretania, Numidia and Africa Proconsularis under the Vandals ...

: ') is an English unit of ''liquid volume'' (not weight), used for measuring wine, oil or honey. It is typically a large vat or vessel, most often holding 252 wine gallons, but occasionally other sizes (e.g. 256, 240 and 208 gallons) were also used.

Pipe or butt

The butt (from the medieval French and Italian ''botte'') or pipe is half a tun, or exactly . Tradition has it that George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV of England, was drowned in a butt of malmsey on 18 February 1478. When

James VI and I James VI and I (James Charles Stuart; 19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625) was King of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and King of Ireland, Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on 24 M ...

sailed to Norway in October 1589, his provisions included a pipe of sack. In

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely re ...

's short story " The Cask of Amontillado", the narrator claims he has received "a pipe of what passes for

Amontillado Amontillado () is a variety of sherry wine characterised by being darker than fino sherry, but lighter than oloroso sherry. Amontillado wine is named after the Montilla municipality, in Andalusia, Spain, where the style of sherry originated in th ...

Puncheon or tertian

The puncheon is a third of a tun. The term ''puncheon'', shortened to pon in the United States. The unit was also known as a ''tertian'' (from the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

word for "third").

Hogshead

Of comparable size to the beer hogshead, the wine

is equal to half a butt or a quarter of a tun.

Tierce

Closely related to the modern oil barrel, the tierce is half a puncheon, a third of a butt, or a sixth of a tun.

Barrel

The wine barrel is half a wine hogshead or an eighth of a tun.

Rundlet

The rundlet is a seventh of a butt or a fourteenth of a tun.

History

Originally, the tun was defined as 256 wine gallons. (This was the basis for calling 64 gallons a quarter.) At some time before the 15th century, it was reduced to 252 gallons, so as to be evenly divisible by other small integers, including seven.252 = Note that a 252-gallon tun of wine has a mass of approximately 2060 pounds,See Ethanol (data page)#Properties of aqueous ethanol solutions. between a short ton (2000 pounds) and a long ton (2240 pounds). The tun is approximately the volume of a cylinder with both diameter and height of 42 inches, as the

was originally a cylinder with diameter of 7 inches and height of 6.The volume, ''V'', of this cylinder may be approximated from the height, ''h'', and the radius, ''r'', as follows. : The Queen Anne wine gallon of 231

cubic inch The cubic inch (symbol in3) is a unit of volume in the Imperial units and United States customary units systems. It is the volume of a cube with each of its three dimensions (length, width, and height) being one inch long which is equivalent ...

es was adopted in 1707, and still serves as the definition of the US gallon. A US tun is thus the volume of a

rectangular cuboid A rectangular cuboid is a special case of a cuboid with rectangular faces in which all of its dihedral angles are right angles. This shape is also called rectangular parallelepiped or orthogonal parallelepiped. Many writers just call these ...

with dimensions 36 by 38.5 by 42 inches. When the imperial system was introduced, the tun was redefined in the UK and its colonies as 210 imperial gallons, meaning the imperial tun remained evenly divisible by small integers,210 = and there was also little change in the actual value of the tun.The imperial tun is only about % larger than the US tun assuming current definitions, since .

Notes

References

{{reflist British wine Units of volume Wine terminology Wine packaging and storage Food and drink industry in England