Would you mind helping me?

Would you mind helping me?

“we had a phenomenal bottle of wine”
Does it mean “we drank very many bottles of wine”?

No it doesn’t. It means we drank a terrific/great bottle of wine.

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cwatson is right. If you wanted to say how many, it would be,

We drank a phenomenal number of bottles of wine.

We also say
a phenomenal success
phenomenal growth
a phenomenal amount of
a phenomenal increase in
a phenomenal memory

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Thank you very much for your comments, cwatson705 and zbrntt!
They are very helpful for me. :slight_smile:

So, in the other word, “we had a phenomenal bottle of wine” means
“we drank a bottle of wine, and it was exceptionally good”?

I wonder if not the wine but the bottle was more or less exceptional, even if the wine could be exceptionally good.

Or a bottle of phenomenal wine? Thank you, SanneT.

Trust you, @Yutaka, to put a twist into the question! If one were a complete stranger to the world, one could perhaps think the shape, colour or quality of craftmanship was phenomenal, but to adult ears there is no question: it was definitely the wine which was exceptionally good…

  1. We had phenomenal wine.
  2. We had a bottle of wine.
  3. We had a phenomenal bottle of wine.
  4. We had a bottle of phenomenal wine.

How are they different?
Umm. If phenomenonal “phenomena” are not always fully understood, . . .

Very good! Excellent! Phenomenal! Philosophical!

“We had a phenomenal bottle of wine.” = “We had a bottle of phenomenal wine.” They can have the same meaning.

“We had a phenomenal bottle of wine” is grammatically ambiguous: we could be saying the bottle was phenomenal, or the wine was phenomenal. However, “a bottle of wine” is a common phrase in English, and I think a good English speaker would understand that “phenomenal” applies to that whole phrase. Also, if we were talking about the bottle (a glass object) then a more natural adjective would be beautiful, or pretty, or something like that.

I think my mum buys “a bottle of wine” more often than she buys “some wine” from the supermarket.

  • What shall we take to the party?
  • Let’s take a bottle of wine. (sounds just as natural to me as “Let’s take some wine.”

People even say, “Let’s take a bottle,” meaning not a glass object, but a bottle of alcohol.

Hope that helps!

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Remember too that a bottle of wine is a bottle with some wine in it, and a wine bottle is just the glass part (most likely empty).

Restaurants often have nice bottles of wine to drink, and they sometimes put candles in wine bottles.

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