July News and Views article
Ever wonder why wine comes in so many different shaped bottles? Why the neck of a Riesling bottle is long and slender, while Bordeaux is kept in a squat, fat necked bottle?
After the advent of glass blowing, wine was stored in round glass bottles because of the ease of blowing round, hollow spheres. As glassblowing techniques evolved, the bottle shape was eventually elongated for easier transport and storage.
Fast forward to the present day, and you can see that winemakers have taken the fairly simple concept of wine preservation and created several nuances when it comes to bottle shape. Just as one can identify the grape varietals of old world wines just by knowing the region from which the wine comes, it is also sometimes possible to identify wines by the shape of the bottle.
We’ll elaborate using the aforementioned Riesling bottle, because that the deviation that is most frequently mentioned by people when they ask us about bottle shape. Most of us have purchased a wine in a long, slender bottle, sometimes just because we liked the shape! The most familiar wines (to the American palate) that are stored in this shaped bottle are Rieslings and Pinot Gris, so when you see one, you can often assume the wine is from Germany or its neighbor, Alsace. Even more specifically, you can narrow your assessment by taking into consideration of the color of the glass, in the case of our example, green glass suggesting the region of Mosel and brown the Rhine region.
As you may have noticed while perusing those rebellious Australian labels, a lot of the old world wine traditions are being broken by New World winemakers. Personally, as a studious little nerd, I really love learning geography and science in order to identify wine. I also find it poetic to conjure images of the rolling hills or dry slopes of different lands and the colors and shapes of glass to identify my wines rather than a silly name or pun, but change is inevitable. Just check out some of the bottle shapes for yourself and have some fun before the tradition ends!