English wine cask units
Capacities of wine casks were formerly measured and standardised according to a specific system of English units.
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 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 of, a barrique of, a barrel of, a barrel of and a puncheon of.
Casks
Tun
The tun is an English unit of liquid volume, 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 were also used.Pipe or butt
The butt 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 sailed to Norway in October 1589, his provisions included a pipe of sack. In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado", the narrator claims he has received "a pipe of what passes for Amontillado".
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.Hogshead
Of comparable size to the beer hogshead, the wine hogshead 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. 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. Note that a 252-gallon tun of wine has a mass of approximately, between a short ton and a long ton.The tun is the approximate volume of a cylinder with both diameter and height of, as the US gallon was originally a cylinder .
The Queen Anne wine gallon of 231 cubic inches 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 with dimensions.
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, and there was also little change in the actual value of the tun.