In India, many people ‘sky’ their drinks. This means that they take a drink from a container without letting it contact their lips or mouth. To ‘sky’ a drink means literally pouring a drink into your mouth from a distance. This method of drinking allows many people to drink from the same container without risking contamination of the drinks by any of the drinkers’ germs. 

Drinking wine from a porro (source: wikipedia)

Spain, which is many miles away from India, uses special vessels known as porron (porro, singular) to ‘sky’ wine. These traditional vessels, popular in Catalonia, allow many people to imbibe from the same vessel without making any contact between it and the mouth. The design of the porro is such that the drink container can be held at a much greater distance from the mouth than in the Indian mode of sky-ing a drink. 

George Orwell was not keen on using porron. He wrote in his Hommage to Catalonia (published 1938):

“A porron is a sort of glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as soon as I saw a porron in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.“

I have no idea when or where the habit of drinking without contacting the vessel originated. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

The top photo was taken in Mattancherry, Kerala, India