It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which is as good as any time to try to find the answer to some extremely dumb questions, such as: How large is Yao Ming’s wine glass?
Does this matter at all to anyone? Of course not. But while mindlessly scrolling on Wednesday night, I came across an advertisement for the Houston Rockets’ legend’s signature blends featuring the seven-footer enjoying a cabernet sauvignon. Nothing looked off about the photo, which is exactly what caught my attention.
As previously noted, Yao is over seven feet tall. He makes other NBA players look small. His hands have a habit of making normal-sized objects appear miniature. How big was this wine glass if it looked proportional to the man holding it? And how much wine can it hold?
Told the family I’m bringing the wine this year for thanksgiving pic.twitter.com/9K2agwH19G
— kyle (@knicks_tape99) November 26, 2024
With a hat tip to SB Nation’s James Dator for the inspiration, we knew we just needed to find something we could compare for scale in the photo to figure out the size of the wine glass.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a ton to go on. We first thought to measure the size of his index finger and use that to get the length of the glass, which would’ve been seemingly easy to do since there are a ton of photos with his hand next to a measuring tape but it proved an imperfect science as his finger was bent at bit in the advertisement.
Fortunately, there were more photos from this same shoot that were much more helpful.
OK, now we’re cooking here. We’ve got the big glass and an even bigger bottle next to it. At first it seemed like the bottle was a Nebuchadnezzar (which holds 15 liters), but after discussing it with For The Win’s resident alcohol guru Christian D’Andrea — as well as comparing with other photos and videos of Nebuchadnezzars — we concluded it was most likely a Balthazar, which holds 12 liters.
I also brought in a little extra backup in the form of the two graphic designers who sit across from me at the co-working space I use. Both were extremely helpful as they noticed some of the photos may have been edited to make the glass look a bit slimmer.
One of them also said, in a direct quote, “I can’t believe I’ve fallen into such a stupid rabbit hole.” Which, yes, welcome to living terminally online.
Onward.
From this point we had to start ballparking a tiny bit. A Balthazar is typically 28 inches tall. If we assume that’s the size of the bottle in this photo, we simply needed to count the pixels and do some of that proportional math our middle school selves truly never thought we’d need in the real world.
Which brings us here:
That works out to a wine glass approximately 12.7 inches tall.
Trying to find a glass for sale between 12 and 13 inches that looks like Yao’s didn’t turn up much in admittedly morning’s long search, but it’s also fair to assume someone with their own wine label with the wealth and stature of Yao Ming would have a custom set for himself. All that said, BigWineGlasses.com sells an 11-inch tall Imperial glass that can hold 34 ounces.
If you need a reference for what a wine glass this large would look like in a normal-sized person’s hands, just search for bachelorette parties in Napa on Instagram and you can find every angle imaginable.
Crucially, this brings us to the end of our epic investigation, because 34 ounces is more than what’s in a standard bottle of wine.
So to answer the questions above: Yao’s glass is at least 11 inches tall, but more likely closer to 13 and it can hold at least an entire bottle.
We have reached out to Yao Family Wines and can hopefully confirm our findings with them soon.