ThePortForum.com

I guess all UK based readers already know about the curiosity of the dollhouse in Windsor castle, which was manufactured for Queen Mary 1924.

What you might not know is that the Berry Brothers supplied the wine-cellar for the dollhouse. There are some 1.200 bottles with orginal labels and ORIGINAL wine inside these bottles. I guess life must have been quite boring at the time.

Portwise there are:

2 dozen – Cockburn Smithes & Co. 1878

2 dozen – Taylor Fladgate 1896

2 dozen – Warre 1900

2 dozen – Fonseca 1908

2 dozen – Dow 1912 (magnums - whatever you call a magnum in a dollhouse)

2 dozen – Royal Tawny

I am not sure about the ageing conditions due to the bottle size...

The full article can be read here: https://blog.bbr.com/2016/06/01/smalles ... ver-dealt/

Axel

Cool story and 1851 Cockburn’s as well!

The dolls’ house is absolutely spectacular. They tried to reproduce all sorts of things from the period so there are barrels of Scotch, books in the library which were written by famous authors, genuine works of art etc. etc. Well worth looking at if you have a chance!

Also discussed in a different BBR blog post: Mystery in miniature.

They have some of the surplus bottles still in a showcase in the shop in St James.

Two dozen of these miniature bottles + some spares seems to me to less than a glass of liquid from the original bottles. I hope they had a good party with the leftovers once the filling process was complete!

(PS. Can you imagine them doing this today: they’ve had to make a miniature T-Cork, a miniature Coravin etc. etc.!)

The Dolls House was one-twelfth size, suggesting bottles hold 757 ÷ 12³ ≈ 0.44ml, or about one 114th of our standard fourteen-person measure.

That assumes that the glass is one-twelfth thickness. If a bit thicker than that, as is plausible, then the bottles would hold even less.