One popular decorative style is the Bellissima, a tall, cylindrical bottle with shoulders and a long neck. The downside is that you’re less likely to finish 1.5 liters at a single sitting, so the leftover wine will lose some quality if you leave it hanging around in the bottle for long.Ī 500 mL bottle is also popular in some decorative bottle lines and is used for ice wines, oils and vinegars. The upside of the big 1.5 liter bottles is that you have fewer bottles to clean and sanitize at bottling time (a pretty big bonus!). Plus, splits make for a nice “single-serving” size to accompany a solo meal.
They’re also perfect if you want to give the wine as a gift and need as many bottles as possible for your thirsty relatives. Splits are great if you have a sweet wine, like ice wine or port, which you usually drink in small amounts. There are larger bottles available, of course, but the diameter of cork required to stopper them exceeds the chamber of most corking machines, so cork insertion can be a bit of a problem. Despite slight variations in the neck diameter, all three sizes work nicely with the most common corks (#7, #8, and #9).
are 375 milliliter (also called a “split”), the 750-milliliter standard bottle and the 1.5 liter large bottle. When the time comes to bottle your batch, select a bottle that enhances the character of your wine and expresses your pride in the finished product. History aside, one thing is clear: Wine bottles come in all sizes, shapes and colors. What was born of necessity ten generations ago appears today to be a comfortable mix of history and marketing. Bottle-makers may also have been influenced by vintners in that region, who requested certain shapes or colors because they felt it suited their style of wine. Why, for example, does the tall brown Hock, or Rhine bottle as it is also called, remind us of the sweet wines of the Alsace and Germany, while the dark green Bordeaux bottle we would associate with a vineyard in France? Perhaps manufacturing equipment and techniques developed independently in each area of Europe during the 1800s and evolved a unique vessel that has endured to this day. Why certain styles of bottles seem linked to a specific geographical region remains clouded. By 1860, the straight-sided, cylindrical container - the prototype of the modern wine and spirit bottle - had emerged. The most common colors, determined mostly by the minerals available to the local bottle-maker, were aqua, green and brown. The leading producers of bottles at this time were the English and the Dutch.īy the mid-1800s bottle necks had grown longer, the “kick-ups” in the bottom were more pronounced and the containers were getting taller overall. Shipping records mention hand-blown bottles with rounded shoulders and flattened sides, called a “chestnut” style. After taking firm root in Europe, wine-drinking then followed explorers across the Atlantic Ocean to the colonies.Īs early as 1660 AD there are records of wine and spirits being shipped from Europe to the New World. As Roman armies expanded their influence beyond the Mediterranean into what would later become France and Germany, they took with them a thirst for wine. Bottles through timeĪrcheological excavations in the Near East have uncovered numerous glass and ceramic containers dating back to 2,000 BC that clearly were intended for the transport and storage of wine. The preference to pair a wine with a bottle of a particular style, size and color is as much history as habit and dates back to the dawn of viniculture itself.
While there’s no definitive rule which states that a particular variety of wine must be stored in a specific style of bottle, winemakers have found their wines are better accepted if packaged in their traditional vessels. Chances are your wine purchase will be influenced by the look of the bottle nearly as much as the variety of grape or the cost of the contents. Next time you have occasion to be in the wine aisle of your local store, look at the shapes, colors and sizes of the different bottles. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” What does this have to do with wine bottles? Quite a lot, really. It was the writer Mark Twain who phrased it best, “Clothes make the man.
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