The Evolution Of The Bottle

The bottle is central to the improvement of wine through ageing. The first bottles were merely serving vessels, used as a decorative, though costly and fragile, way of bringing wine to table. It took a 17th-century breakthrough in glass-making, first made in England and soon taken up in Holland and France, to provide a supply of strong bottles. The key was a coal-burning furnace — charcoal had been banned by King James I because it consumed vital ship-building timber — made extra-hot by the use of a wind-tunnel. These bottles were strong, dark in colour (and thus opaque to light), regular in shape and above all cheap: the ideal containers for maturing wine. By the mid-18th century the original globe shape had evolved into the tall cylinder we know today, suitable for "binning" — storing on its side with the cork moist, the necessary posture for bottle-ageing of the wine.