"Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!" — Benjamin Franklin, from The Posthumous and Other Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1819)

From my experience, the best guarantee of happiness with wine is to share a bottle with your favorite wine-drinking companion at dinner. The 750-ml bottle is proof that man knows this; it is the perfect sized vessel for sharing wine with a loved one.

Since 1979, the metric standard wine bottle size was set at 750 milliliters or approximately 25.4 ounces. This represents an ideal two glasses of wine for the woman and three for the man. I don't mean to make a sexist statement. Healthy moderate alcohol consumption is best computed by weight. A nongender way to say this is there are three glasses for the heavier partner and two for the lighter one.

Wine is best shared at the dinner table because wine is sauce. With each bite of food, a sip of wine. Wine is a squeeze of lemon on fish, the salsa on a corn chip, the béarnaise on a steak. Each sip of wine immediately following a bite of food is a palate heightener. With good wine, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And each sip also acts as a palate cleanser, cleaning the palate and inviting another bite of food. And so it goes, until dinner is over, and the bottle is empty.

Five ounces of wine is equivalent in alcohol consumption to 12 ounces of beer or one and a half ounces of liquor. European medical reports state that four such units per day for an average-sized male denotes moderate consumption and two units for a woman. In America, home of binge drinking and creator of the lost weekend, Puritan-inspired medical reports say two units for a man and one for a woman constitutes moderate consumption. Adding these two opinions and dividing by two says to me three glasses of wine for a man and two for a woman is perfect. All reports say that moderate wine consumption is good for your heart, lowers bad cholesterol and raises the good cholesterol.

Beer makes me bloated and liquor gets me drunk, so when I drink, I drink wine. When I drink wine, it is only with food. When the food is gone, drinking is done. Enjoying wine in the ultimate fashion, my partner and I will spend a half hour making dinner together sipping a glass while noshing on bits of cheese, and then another hour at the dinner table, each finishing our share of the bottle.

The question arises, then, what to drink when you drink alone? If you are at a bar or restaurant, there is always the wine by the glass program. But, when you are at home, what to open? Five years a single parent, I have religiously continued to put together a family dinner every night with my daughters. Just as ritually, I always have wine with dinner. I can't imagine either of these two things any other way. But since both my kids are teenagers, they are yet to become part of the bottle equation.

Wine, once open, has a shelf life. Air, over a period of days, is the enemy of wine. Even when properly resealed, an open bottle will start to oxidize overnight. So what to open to avoid waste?

There are half bottles of wine (375 ml), but that is a half glass short for me to get through the meal. I can always open a full bottle, and often do, but there is waste in not drinking it all so the question becomes one of overnight storage. Studies have shown that the best way to keep a partial bottle fresh for the next day is to use a simple rubber-lined, snap-in closure and place in the fridge. Even for red wines this is preferred, as there is less air in the fridge and the cold air will offset the other enemy of wine: heat. Taking the partial bottle out of the fridge an hour before dinner the next night solves the problem of drinking your red wine too cold.

But still, that partial bottle for the next night of drinking alone has only two glasses, one glass short for me. So, I can and often do open another 750ml bottle for the third glass, but then I have four glasses left in the next night's partial, one glass too much. I have come up with some other solutions.

One of my favorite and easiest solutions is to drink German Riesling. Aside from being delicious and lip-smackingly good, the Riesling grape has intrinsic high acid. Since acid acts as a preservative, the bottle has a longer shelf life once open. I find I have multiple bottles of open Riesling properly resealed in my fridge for days at a time without a worry of the wine losing its vibrant freshness. German Riesling also has a lower alcohol content, generally around 9 percent versus the traditional 13 percent to 14 percent. So, having an extra glass is a healthy, moderate wine-drinking possibility over the course of dinner.

Another option when drinking alone, aside from the comfortable rotation of multiple partial bottles of Riesling in the fridge, is to start with one or two glasses of German Riesling while making dinner, and then open a half bottle of something else at dinner, perhaps a Pinot or a Chianti. Brilliant!

Still, this formula only works if you like German Riesling. There are wines in a box these days that have the advantage of maintaining freshness. But so far there is not a lot of variety or quality available.

The perfect solution for what to open when you drink alone is the 500-ml bottle. But, there are a limited number of wines bottled in this format. In France's Beaujolais region a 500-ml bottle (called a pot) has long been used, but sadly not exported.

Other bottle terminology, oftentimes used in wine circles are: magnum-1.5 liters/two standard bottles; double magnum-3 liters/four standard bottles (in Bordeaux); Jeroboam-3 liters/four bottles (in Champagne); Methuselah-6 liters/eight bottles; Imperial-6 liters/8 bottles; Salmanazar-9 liters/12 bottles; Balthazar-12 liters/16 bottles; and Nebuchadnezzar-15 liters/20 bottles. Many of these larger formats are quite useful, and have the wow-factor, when entertaining larger groups.

But for useful drinking alone, I propose we SPAWs (Single Parents Alone with Wine) lobby the winemaking populace to start making the 500ml a regular option at the bottling line. If God wants us to be happy, give us our pots of wine!

Greg O'Byrne is executive director of the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta. His column appears in Taste on the third Wednesday of every month. Questions or comments? Write to vinevents@aol.com.