Recently at a restaurant, a server presented the bottle of Chateau de la Gardine Côtes du Rhône I had ordered with dinner. My recollection of the wine didn’t sharpen fully until she poured a small taste, but it wasn’t a distinctive aroma that activated my memory. It was the profile of the bottle hovering over my glass. Squashed, with a slight droop. The story came rushing back: a cellar fire, a melted bottle, the mold made from it and used to shape the bottles of future vintages.
We rarely notice wine bottles. Even the server hadn’t registered the unusual shape of the Gardine. We sniff and slurp and swallow the wine itself, trying to tease out its story, but we generally ignore its container, tossing it into the recycling bin without a second thought.
Yet bottles have followed their own historical arc to the table, co-evolving with wine, with each exerting influence on the other like planets bobbing in and out of each other’s orbits. On the shelves of any wine store, you can see how bottles underlie the global wine industry, keeping their contents safe as they travel from France or Australia. You can see in their clean lines the power of industrial machines that churn out identical shapes at breathtaking speed. You can see the Old World’s still-strong influence in the wine world: most New World wineries still use the traditional shapes from Europe, despite the availability of stylish modern designs.
Bottles and wine are integral to each other today, but that’s a recent development. Until the twentieth century, most producers shipped wine in barrels. Some wineries still do. Traditional restaurants throughout Europe stack barrels of house wine along the walls, and acquaintances of mine in the Loire refill their supply of wine by driving empty barrels to local wineries. A bottle was little more than a convenient way to get the wine to the table until fairly recent times.
Historically, the cost of bottles was their biggest drawback. Until the 1600s, each bottle was blown freeform by a skilled glassblower, a single long breath supposedly defining a standard size for bottles that remains the norm today. But even after glassworkers sped up the bottle-making process and lowered the cost by using forms to shape the molten glass as it was blown out, the containers continued to reflect the cost of an artisan’s time. The well-to-do, however, could commission a sizeable inventory of the new bottles that would proclaim their ownership, decorated with seals (initials or a coat of arms) affixed to the bottle after it came out of the mold. Similar seals exist today on bottles from Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Saumur-Champigny.
As bottles became more common in the households of the wealthy, some aristocrats no doubt noticed that wine in bottles stayed fresh longer than wine in a cask. The porous wood in a barrel allows air to enter and oxidize the wine, while the inert glass walls of a bottle keep the liquid safe. English gentlemen began to store wine in the bottle so they could enjoy it longer. Many credit Sir Kenelm Digby with conceiving a “wine bottle” in the 1630s that was well-suited for its purpose. We’d recognize many of its features today. A deep punt, or well, in the bottom stabilized the bottle, thick walls made long-term storage safer, and metals dissolved into the molten glass created tints that prevented sunlight from draining the color and flavor from the wine. “The subsequent growth and development of the English bottle industry are credited to the new wine bottle and the changing customs that it accompanied,” writes Helen McKearin in American Bottles & Flasks and Their Ancestry.
That English wine bottle, which resembled a head of garlic, evolved in tiny ways throughout the 17th century. But a radical shift happened at the beginning of the 18th century. “A wine bottle mutation occurred that was alien to the bottles of the time,” continues McKearin, “It was a long, cylindrical bottle, slender and free-blown.” The new bottle shape caught the interest of contemporary wine merchants because it was ideal for “binning” wine horizontally in cellars for long periods of time. This was particularly important as the English became fond of a wine that benefited from bottle age: Port. In addition to the storage benefits of the thin but sturdy bottle, its high, squared shoulders helped prevent sediment from pouring into a drinker’s glass. Nevertheless, the shape didn’t take off until the middle of the 18th century when glassblowers acquired the appropriate molds. The standardized shape allowed merchants to seal bottles for their clients with a single size of closure. Quickly, an even taller, thinner version of the bottle came into use to hold England’s other favorite wine, “claret” from the Bordeaux region. As wine enthusiasts stored bottles longer, wine makers could develop wines with the potential to mature in the cellar, and clarets began evolving into the wines we know today.
In France, bottles mimicked the English versions, but without the sharp shoulders. The Burgundy bottle we know today was influential, spreading down the Rhone and up into Champagne, where artisans needed to thicken the walls to withstand the pressure of the sparkling wine inside.
The next big step was automation, which Ricketts of Bristol achieved with a bottle-making machine in 1821. But the bottle revolution didn’t happen instantaneously. The bottles still required an investment that was no doubt daunting to small wine makers, and bottling was a labor-intensive activity. New World wineries lagged behind even their provincial European cousins. In California, bottling was uncommon until World War II, when government-imposed price controls made bottled wine more lucrative than wine sold in barrel.
Today, wineries might almost say that bottles have been too successful. Although the glass protects wine as it travels the world, wineries also need to compete for a consumer’s dollar with a seemingly infinite number of other wines on a store’s shelf. Bottles themselves have become one weapon in this battle. Modern production techniques allow wineries to choose from a wide range of shapes, and some wineries take advantage of these new forms to grab a consumer’s eye. An unusual shape might be the difference between a customer taking a particular bottle home or leaving it on the shelf.
“It is very important in the market place to have a point of difference,” says Jeff Meyers, winemaker for Montevina, whose Terra d’Oro bottles are among the most striking on a normal shelf. The winery uses a tall, slender bottle (with the attractive model name of Bellissima II) which it then decorates with etched, painted artwork. The stylings add a lot of cost to the bottle, but the look has paid off. “This branding contributes mightily to sales,” says Meyers. It’s not without its problems, however. At mega-retailers Sam’s and Costco, display cases designed to look like old Bordeaux boxes force Montevina’s bottles to sit at an angle, “which makes no one happy,” says Meyers.
Maire Murphy, who owns Sin É winery along with her husband, says the Prelude model of bottle they chose for their Magnet Pinot Noir differentiated them on the shelf, but perhaps too much. Instead of the slope of a Burgundy bottle that most producers use for Pinot Noir, the Prelude evokes a straight-backed, hoop-skirted teenager from the 1950s. “Some thought the wine was Syrah,” she says. The winery is scaling back on the radical design, adopting something closer to the standard Burgundy bottle for the Magnet Pinot Noir and Solex Chardonnay, whose previous bottle was too tall for some wine refrigerators.
Standard wine furniture is the bane of every winery trying to woo customers with an intriguing bottle shape. Robert Haas, owner of Tablas Creek in Paso Robles, says that their new bottle for Esprit de Beaucastel, the winery’s flagship wine, is a little fatter than their other bottles. “We wanted to distinguish Esprit from other wines and our own wines,” he says. But the new bottle’s bigger base has generated complaints from wine stores with narrow vertical racks. It’s unclear if Haas will switch back, but he is considering alternatives for a unique branding. His partners at Tablas Creek, the Perrins of Domaine de Beaucastel, recently designed a special bottle for their wines using the estate’s coat of arms in lieu of the standard Chateauneuf-du-Pape arms. “We’ve thought about doing something along those lines with our bottles,” he says, “but we haven’t made the leap yet.”
Given the relatively recent adoption of bottles as the predominant vessel for wine, our attitudes about them are surprisingly entrenched. As Sin É discovered, consumers expect certain grapes to go in certain bottles. We distrust bottles that are a non-standard size, even though the historic reason for a 750-ml bottle-a legacy, supposedly, of the average lung capacity of a glass blower-is irrelevant in this age of machined glass. But ask any retailer how well quality wine sells in liter bottles and you’ll likely get a straight answer: it doesn’t. We still expect to find a punt, which now serves only an aesthetic purpose. Indeed, some wineries use a deeper punt to push the bottles into a larger space, making them seem more imposing and age-worthy.
Haas challenges entrenched attitudes about bottles as he ponders their future. “The plastic in boxes degrades over time,” he says, “but if you think about it, the perfect container for keeping wine fresh might be a can.” Niebaum-Coppola made news when they released their “Sofia” bubbly in a can, though other producers haven’t fallen suit. We take our bottles for granted now, but if Haas is right, we should perhaps appreciate them while we are able.
Derrick Schneider is a freelance wine writer and educator based in Oakland, CA. He may be reached via his website, http://www.obsessionwithfood.com. He is partial to Alsatian bottles.