Guzzle Buddy: From Cougar Town sitcom to real life

A wine glass that attaches to the bottle neck to supposedly save busy drinkers from pouring before imbibing has hit the headlines and sold quickly online, two years after being floated in an American sitcom.

Guzzle Buddy sold out on Amazon.co.uk within hours of achieving widespread press commentary for its stemless wine glass that can be screwed into the top of a bottle.

It allows anyone to drink straight from the bottle but with the dubious edge of pouring the wine through a glass first.

Consumers in the UK and US could buy it via Amazon for under $30 – before stocks ran out on the retailer’s UK site.

The UK government tightened its rhetoric on alcohol consumption earlier this year, warning that no one should drink more than 14 units in a week. And many fine wines benefit from being decanted before consumed.

A very similar glass also called Guzzle Buddy featured in US sitcom Cougar Town in 2014 as part of a spoof shopping channel sketch.

‘We saw that episode and then went on a hunt to find it,’ Randy Rothfus, sales manager for the real life Guzzle Buddy, told Decanter.com. ‘However, no one had come up with it yet so we made it.’

Two of the main characters, one of them played by actress Courtney Cox, spilled wine while pouring into a normal glass and complained of ‘wine wrist’ from tipping a heavy bottle.

But, their problems evaporated after using Guzzle Buddy.

Rothfus said that real life Guzzle Buddy was ‘very lighthearted and not meant to be a super serious wine product’. But, he added that, ‘with all that said we made a very strong glass made from borosilicate and not some cheap flimsy thin glass’.

Images of the packaging on Amazon borrow phrases from the Cougar Town episode, including ‘plug it and chug it’ and ‘no more suffering from wine wrist’.

Guzzle Buddy’s product description on Amazon describes the glass as, ‘Fun, unique and humorous’.

One 175ml glass of 13% abv wine is around 2.3 units, according to the Drinkaware charity.