(Wine-Searcher) - Bigger is not always better when it comes to wine bottles, Sam Behrend discovers.

As with many aspects of fine dining, much pomp and circumstance can be ascribed to opening a bottle of wine.

Of course, there are those who might tout pragmatism and happily push the cork into the bottle using the nearest appropriate instrument (an ardent subscriber to MacGyver's methods, I recommend the handle of a spoon). Being served a bottle in many a restaurant however, will probably deliver on the familiar displays of etiquette: presentation of the label and cork, never letting the bottle touch the table, and pouring while holding the base or the punt.

But how do you serve a bottle that weighs 1400lbs?

Bottle sizes have varied since the use of cork began in the 1700s to store and age wine. The accepted standard bottle holds 750ml, this is doubled with the magnum and quadrupled with the double magnum (or jeroboam for Burgundy and Champagne). The largest bottles have traditionally been named after Biblical kings such as the salmanazar (9 liters) and nebuchadnezzar (15L).

This millennium, however, has seen several moves to set record sizes because, at some point, the collective community decided pouring a mere 200 glasses of Champagne from a single Melchizedek would not do.

In 2004, the Napa producer Beringer bottled its 2001 Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon in a 1.38-meter (4.5 feet) tall bottle. It weighed 68kg (150lbs) empty and held 130 liters; that's the equivalent of 173 bottles. Dubbed the Maximus, and commissioned by the American steakhouse chain, Morton's, the bottle sold for $55,812 at a charity auction, and won Beringer a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records – at the same auction, six magnums of 1959 Château Mouton Rothschild sold for USD$44,650.

Maximus failed to quench our thirst, however, and in 2010 its reign as largest bottle was over. At 2.4m tall, holding 480L and weighing a total of 630kg (1388lb), Weinlaubenhof Kracher set a new record with a bottling of 2005 Trockenbeerenauslese Nouvelle Vague Grand Cuvée No.7. Perhaps anticipating a swing in the popular perception of sweet wines (and possibly using all the botrytized grapes in Burgenland), the bottle is kept on display at the restaurant Gasthaus zum Gupf in Rehetobel, Switzerland.

But even Kracher's record was short-lived. In the same year, an obscenely large 4.56m, 1850L bottle from Wang Chen Wines in Liaoning, China, was filled with ice wine. The bottle was made to celebrate the beginning of the Shenyang Food Festival. To put that into perspective, also in 2010, Canada, the world's largest consistent producer of ice wine, shipped 25,404 liters to the United States in total. The popularity of ice wine in China has increased and now a number of Chinese labels can be found internationally.

But it couldn't be left at that. As of writing this piece, more than one bottle has surpassed Wang Chen, and more than one of them has been Swiss. Currently the largest bottle in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is 4.17m tall, has a circumference of 3.77m and holds 3094L of wine. From Lyssach, Switzerland, the bottle was commissioned by car importer André Vogel to celebrate the opening of a new branch of his business, Vogels Offroad.

So, beyond perhaps paying a low corkage fee to pour 20,000 glasses of wine, does bottle size matter?