Duff McDonald points
me to the story of the £105,805
bar tab. Which is undoubtedly large. I’ve been doing some sums:
- You probably knew that champagne gets more expensive the bigger the bottle.
But did you know how much more expensive? One bottle of Cristal at this bar
costs £360. A jeroboam of Cristal – which is four bottles –
costs £4,800, or the equivalent of £1,200 per bottle. And a methuselah
of Cristal, which is eight bottles, costs £30,000, or the equivalent
of £3,750 per bottle – more than ten times the individual
bottle rate. If you get six glasses of champagne out of a bottle, that works
out at $1,281 per glass.
- The revellers ended up ordering 103 bottle-equivalents of wine and champagne
between them, as well as 10 bottle-equivalents of vodka. If there were, as
reported, 19 of them in all, that works out to 5.5 bottles of champagne
– plus half a bottle of vodka – apiece.
- Let’s say that works out to 33 drinks of champagne and 13 drinks of vodka
each, for a total of 46 drinks over the course of a seven-hour evening. If
you assume that the drinkers were relatively normal 200 lb men, then a Widmark
calculation puts their blood-alcohol level by the end of the evening at
well over 600mg/ml. Which, by most medical accounts, means they should
all be dead.