At some point, after a few glasses of wine, the question may pop into your head: “How many grapes did it take to make this bottle of wine?” Granted, this is one of the more mundane questions you could ask yourself while enjoying a wine buzz, but an interesting one nonetheless. We’re not going to beat around the bush here, we’re just going to tell you. Okay? Here goes.
First, we start by thinking of wine grapes in terms of tons and gallons. This is how most case-projections are calculated, and the measurements most wineries use when they think of their product.
Yield of grapes can be controlled by those that farm them. A vineyard manager can crop the yield to 1 ton per acre, or let it go nuts and get up to more than 8 tons per acre, depending on the grape. Generally speaking, lower yields are thought to produce better quality grapes. The worldwide average of quality wine grapes per acre is approximately 3 tons. If you have no idea how big an acre actually is, it’s slightly smaller than a football field (because America).
That being said, 1 ton of grapes equals about 155 gallons of finished wine. And 155 gallons of wine equals about 65 cases of wine. At 12 bottles a case, that’s about 782 bottles. Give or take.
So, where are we now? We have a typical 12-bottle case of wine, and each bottle represents 1/782nd of a ton. Ouch! Don’t let your head spin out of control there. We’re this close to the actual answer. 1/782nd is about 0.13% of a ton. Your acre produces 3 tons of grapes, and each ton is 2,000 pounds. Therefore, each bottle has about 2.6 pounds of grapes in it. Would you believe me if I told you I was a *terrible* math student?
The very last piece of the puzzle is this: How many grapes are in a pound? Again, this will vary based on what kind of grapes we’re talking about, but let’s take a happy medium. A ripe grape weighs about 1.6 grams. If we convert that to ounces, we get about 17.7 berries per ounce. Isn’t this fun?! No but really… Take that 2.6 pounds of grapes per bottle, and remember that 1 pound has 16 ounces, and we inevitably arrive at the riveting conclusion – drumroll please…
There are about 736 grapes in a bottle of wine.
Don’t you feel great about this? That means each glass is about 164 grapes. Isn’t it so much more fun to drink a glass of wine than it is to eat 164 grapes? We think so. While this was a ton of fun, we won’t blame you if now that you know the answer, you never think about this again. Cheers, y’all.
