LONDON — Britons will be able to buy pints of wine for the first time in decades in a move hailed by U.K. ministers as a benefit of Brexit.
An overhaul of U.K. measurement laws announced for 2024 means wine producers will be able to sell still and sparkling wines in the pint-sized bottles once beloved by wartime leader Winston Churchill.
It’s far from clear how many people want to buy wine by the pint. Proposals for a wider post-Brexit overhaul of Britain’s measurement system have been scrapped after a government consultation, the results of which were published Wednesday, found 98.7 percent of people were in favor of keeping metric units when buying or selling products.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government is still pressing ahead with offering producers the option of selling pre-packaged pints of wine, which it says is now allowed under the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023, passed earlier this year.
The U.K. government announced still and sparkling wine producers will now be allowed to sell their produce in 568 milliliter measures — pints — as well as existing 200 milliliter and 500 milliliter measures next year.
“Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this, where we can seize new opportunities and provide a real boost to our great British wineries and further growing the economy,” Kevin Hollinrake, a business minister, said in a statement issued by the Department for Business and Trade.
Pint bottles of champagne were favored by Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, with the use of imperial measurements becoming a symbolic fight for some Brexiteers, who wanted to see the EU’s weights and measures directive and its requirement to use metric units for the sale of fresh produce, reversed.
During the 2019 general election campaign, former prime minister and figurehead of the Brexit campaign Boris Johnson pledged that he would bring back imperial units in shops, claiming measuring in pounds and ounces was an “ancient liberty.”
Although it was still legal to price goods in pounds and ounces in the U.K., it had to be displayed less prominently than the price in grams and kilograms.
