17 September 2007 by Sandy Hemphill
From Big Shoulders to Blue Glass: A Guide to Wine Bottles
Have you ever wondered why wine bottles have all those different shapes? Some of them are so tall they hardly fit in the refrigerator but others fit quite nicely. And some of them are blue. Why?
For the simplest answer to these questions, we’ll have to go back in time at least 100 years, and beyond.
At that point in time, and now, the wine bottle shape identified where the wine came from. Wines from different regions taste different and most of us prefer to know enough to make an educated guess when selecting a wine.
But education was different back then. It was mostly the aristocracy and clergy that were allowed to learn to read. And if it was aristocracy, it was mostly the aristocratic men who were taught to read. There were very few ladies of any station who enjoyed such an education.
It was in France that wine making became territorial first, so different wine bottle shapes were first used there as identifiers. The different shapes made it possible for someone shopping in a market in, say, Paris, to know they were buying the wine from their home region or trying something altogether new and exciting, without the need to read the label.
In the Bordeaux region, wines are full-bodied with deep, well-developed flavors and a high level of tannins. These wines all come in tall, thin bottles with big “shoulders” at the top of the bottle. These wines originally contained a large amount of sediment that settled better in tall, straight-sided bottles.
Softer, more delicate wines come from the region of Burgundy, where the climate is less warm and sunny. These wines –mostly Pinot Noir, Pinot Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris — have deeply sloping shoulders and are wider at the bottom than at the top of the bottle.
Champagne is a part of Burgundy, so Champagne bottles resemble Burgundy bottles except they are made from thicker, stronger glass and have a deep dimple in the bottom of the bottle. This dimple enhances the bubbles and the thicker glass is a safety measure to keep those bubbles bottled until it’s time to celebrate.
You’ll know by looking that wine bottles that are very tall, very thin, and have almost no shoulder at all are Alsatian. This part of Europe has changed hands over time, belonging at one to time to France, or Germany, or Switzerland, or Prussia, or . . .
Regardless of politics, the Alsatian region is cool and mountainous. Wine made here is very light and delicate, often on the sweet side. Not only are the bottles used here unique in shape, they are often colored blue, green, or yellow in order to protect the delicacy inside from excess sunlight.
In order to grow wine in any region around the world, the climate has to be pretty much similar to that in France and the latitude must be similar, too. The grapes grown for winemaking in these regions may vary from those used in France but they are similar, too.
These similarities led winemakers to bottle their wines in wine bottle shapes that match their closest French counterpart. Which is very nice for us, even though most of us today can read the labels. Which are sometimes intimidating nevertheless.
It’s nice to know that looking at the wine bottle shape at least points us in the right direction.