The modern bottle shape, designed for export and aging, protects the wine from bumpy overseas journeys while the prominent shoulder is thought to help catch the sediment that forms when a wine ages. He founded the first glass blowing workshop for the area in 1723 and is believed to have invented the jeroboam shape as well. Jane Anson, author of Bordeaux Legends and a contributing editor at Decanter, says credit for the shape is usually attributed to Pierre Mitchell, who built Château du Tertre in Margaux in 1736. standardized the 750mL size, however, the more traditional Bordeaux bottle was 500mL and more rounded. The modern Bordeaux wine bottle shape, stocky with broad shoulders, is usually used to bottle heavier reds, such as cabernet sauvignon. “My theory, though I underscore that it’s no more than that, is that the different bottle shapes allowed the would-be 18th- and early 19th-century drinker to easily distinguish the type of wine inside the bottle,” he says. “Add to this that labels would have been of little use beyond perhaps the vintage because the illiteracy rate was very high in those days.” Meadows theorizes that distinctive shapes emerged as a way to tell apart one region’s wine from another, and then stayed that way because there was no reason to change it. Meadows says the origins of the specific shape are murky. The Burgundy bottle, with lightly sloped shoulders and a pear-shaped figure, is now used worldwide for Burgundian grapes (pinot noir and chardonnay), as well as syrah, grenache, chenin blanc and others. These European shapes (organized from left to right) are the most recognizable and have been adopted by winemakers around the world. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most common-and some of the most distinctive-bottles on wine shelves today. For instance, a Carmelo Patti cabernet sauvignon from Argentina gets bottled in a Bordeaux-style bottle to be aligned with the European tradition, while Armand de Brignac Brut Gold gets a flashy gold bottle so it can be recognized from across the room (or in a dark nightclub). But it can still be useful to understand the differences, primarily because the shape a winemaker chooses is often a clue to his or her intentions or, in some cases, stylistic proclivities. With the advent of better manufacturing and branding campaigns for export markets, wine bottle shapes nowadays have more to do with marketing than anything else. standardized the 750mL size, ultimately tampering down on outliers, like the more traditional 500mL Bordeaux bottle and the slightly larger Burgundy and Champagne bottles, among many others. The regional shapes that we know today emerged after the 1970s, when the E.U. Moreover, the first glass factory in France was already operating by 1752, which meant that these merchants could have ordered whatever shape they wanted with relative ease.” “There would have been extensive knowledge of what was going on in other wine regions.
He points out, though, that Burgundian wine merchants were already traveling abroad in the 18th century. “The usual point of view is that when bottles were being developed there was less travel between regions, and thus each of them developed bottle shapes independently,” said wine critic Allen Meadows, of, in an email. Regional variations of bottle shapes emerged thereafter, though finding a definitive answer as to the who’s and why’s of the equation isn’t always easy. According to the Oxford Companion to Wine, the adoption of the cork closure prompted a switch to the more modern cylindrical shape, which allowed bottles to be stored on their sides. Glass bottles began to be commonly used in the 17th century, often in bladder- or onion-type shapes that were stored upright.
For something so obvious sounding-what could be more basic than a wine bottle?-there’s heaps of variation, from the classic shapes to the hilariously flamboyant ones (ahem, verdicchio).īut bottle size-both in shape and volume-used to vary much more. When we talk about wine, we like to say it’s what’s in the bottle that counts.
0 kommentar(er)
