Wine has always inspired prophecy and Trimalchio’s famed Vita vinum est lies there with the best of them. He came to the conclusion that wine is life during one of his dinners and loudly announced it to his guests. (Petronius, Satyricon 34.)  This brings me to the subject of bottles – how  long have we been bottling the stuff? When did we first start using glass; what did we use before that and who discovered it in the first place? So apart from the terroir, the grapes, the wine and the genius of the winemaker who’s responsible for what for making the bottle and the glass

so that you don’t need to drink out of clay or, God forbid, wood? Today, wine is usually sold in glass bottles with paper labels stuck  to the bottles so that all necessary details are revealed to the would-be-buyer. It certainly hasn’t been like that for time immemorial. In the days of yore, wine was stored, transported and served in amphorae – large, long containers that varied in size and, often, made pouring hellishly difficult – like these, below that date back to 1000 BC.

They weren’t always made of glass as we know it today – silica is present in sand and in order to make glass, the sand was melted and a crude form of glass was produced using extremely labour intensive methods. The Syro-Palestines discovered the process around 3000 BC, it was developed in Egypt around 1500 BC  and the seafaring Phoenicians exported it all over the place. Below, Egyptian jugs and a drinking vessel made from an early form of glass. It is commonly believed that the Romans invented glass, but this isn’t quite the truth – it was the history of Rome that gave Rome the opportunity to develop it and gave glassworkers the opportunity to make use of and experiment with many  new technologies, many of which were originally discovered by people of different countries – it became Roman only because the Romans conquered most of the known world at the time. It all started in the time of of Caesar Augustus (after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC) when the bloody civil war ended and Rome was again, rightfully, the capital of the entire Roman Empire which now included almost all of the Eastern Mediterranean of the time – part of this was Syria and Palestine – East and West of the Jordan river. Augustan Rome was insanely wealthy with a population that was over a million strong and the demand for glass was huge. Glassmaking became a very profitable business as it was the only way in which massive amounts of the stuff  could be manufactured – with their typical genius, the Romans took off from there and started an industry that would, one day, literally rule the world of wine.

Glass wasn’t an immediate hit, though – it was cheaper than crystal or precious metals and the feeling about it, ambivalent. Caesar Gallienus who ruled for 8 years from 260 AD onwards, wouldn’t drink out of glass because ‘nothing was more common, whereas a man like  Tacitus during his one year rule from 275 to 276 AD apparently took ‘great pleasure in the  diversity and elaborate workmanship of glass’.  Trimalchio, in Petronius’s Satyricon 34, comments when he speaks to some dinner guests ‘you will excuse me for what I am about to say: I prefer glass vessels. Certainly, they don’t smell and, if they weren’t so fragile, I would prefer them to gold. These days, however, they are cheap‘. He was right, the glass didn’t leave a bad taste or smell, unlike many of the other containers used at the time. He was famous for serving rare vintage wines in glass amphorae and for insisting that foodstuffs, like the delicious but pricey garum, be stored in glass jars.

In the region of Syria and Palestine (known as Syro-Palestine), excavations have confirmed that Roman glassmakers must have produced many tons of glass – enough to make tens of thousands of bottles, glasses and containers and because it was recycled, there was a lot of business for the smaller street traders who did good business selling broken glass to the artisans that made (often exquisite) glass items from it (see above) – quite different to the ordinary glass items in use at the time. Blowing clear glass started during the 15th century in Venice when a clear glass called cristallo (lead glass) was invented by the Italians and then widely exported. In their book, Beyond Venice, Jutta-Annette Page and Ignasi Doménech describe the advent of Venetian glass in detail and whilst I don’t often do this, the writing style is so good that I’d really recommend you all read it – or at least some of it.  It’s worth the time.

The early bottles were unusual looking – globular bottles with long conical necks were favoured in England but in Europe, the onion and balloon or bladder shaped bottles were favoured. By the 1720′s the onion became taller and the sizes change, and and became flatter – moving towards the bottles we know today. Beer was bottled in leather in the 17th century when glass became expensive, but the trend soon died out, when white tin-glazed earthenware known as delftware was substituted in it’s place.  An 1887 bottle of Château Lafite – each bottle was individually stamped with date, name of wine estate and very often with a hallmark, as you will see further on. It was very expensive and as time progressed, the tendency died out and one sees this only very rarely nowadays.

A silver bottle with hallmark inscribed on it as proof of it’s quality and excellence.

Maybe next time you take a sip of wine from a glass, you’ll spare a second or two to remember the wars, the horrendously hard work, the blood, the sweat and the sheer genius that brings us a privilege we take for granted so easily.