The modern wine buyer will know instinctively what bottles shapes to be looking for if seeking wine of a particular variety or style. Most of us would seek a rack of claret bottles in a shop if seeking a cabernet or cabernet blend, while we expect a chardonnay to be packaged into a Burgundy shape bottle. Similarly, we wonder why companies like Yarra Yering might bottle their Pinot Noir into a Bordeaux bottle, or even Jacob’s Creek would insert its under-rated Riesling into a clear version of the same shape. Why? What – if anything at all – should we read into a bottle shape?
The earliest wine bottles were rather round and globular, with tall conical necks. When wine bottles began to be manufactured in England in the 1820s they were made with more regular cylindrical sides, although their necks were long and extended. This ensured that they could be matured in a rack by lying on their sides, and in doing so using the wine inside to keep their corks moist.
Today, different European regions bottle their wines using glass of different shapes and colours, but this largely evolved through fashion rather than technical necessity. The actual shape of the bottle has no effect whatsoever on the maturation of the wine inside. The colour of the glass can have some effect however, since old-fashioned looking green and brown bottles exclude damaging ultraviolet light far better than the very light green and even entirely clear glass so popular with early-drinking white wines these days. You would take a risk by maturing a wine bottled in very lightly coloured or clear glass in a well-lit place.
While there is perhaps a small amount of logic in the way the major bottle shapes have developed, none of it is particularly applicable today. More to the point, if a maker of a wine chooses to use the shape associated with a particular region, that’s more of a statement of intent about the wine he or she is making. In other words, if a Yarra Valley-based winemaker uses a burgundy bottle for a chardonnay, you could fairly assume that the wine in question is made as a complex, wood-matured (if not indeed oak fermented) chardonnay of richness and character, ie with characteristics one might associate with a wine from Burgundy.
Let’s take a quick look at the major bottle shapes. The ‘claret’ shape of bottle originated in Bordeaux, where the principal variety is cabernet sauvignon. Given that cabernet can be matured for many years, after which it is neither unreasonable nor unexpected for a deposit to emerge in the wine, it makes perfect sense that the claret bottle has prominent, high shoulders within which sediment can easily settle while a bottle is being poured, preventing it from appearing in the wine in the glass. They’re the main reasons behind the claret or Bordeaux shape, which is used the world over for blends based on cabernet sauvignon or merlot, the second most important grape used in Bordeaux. Bordeaux’ white wines, from semillon, sauvignon blanc and muscadelle, use the same shape out of deference and not practicality, although their glass might be lighter.
The Burgundy shape evolved in this very region for its indigenous pinot noir and chardonnay. Typically, pinot noir will not produce the amount of sediment expected with a wine from cabernet sauvignon (or shiraz), so it’s quite understandable that the Burgundy bottle evolved with shoulders that slope a great deal, since they’re not designed to capture sediment. Today, most serious wines around the world made from pinot or chardonnay are still bottled in this shape.
It’s mainly with shiraz that today we see a divergence of bottle shape with a single variety. Traditional ripe, richer and more concentrated expressions of Australian shiraz – typically from the warmer regions – are usually given a Bordeaux shape bottle. On the other hand, if the wine is more medium in weight, fragrant, finely structured and savoury – indeed more Rhone-like in style – it’s more likely to be found in a Burgundy bottle, a small variation of which is typically used in the Rhone Valley, France.
The traditional German riesling shape is extremely narrow and tall, with an exceptionally long conical neck. There is no evidence for what I am about to suggest, but this shape perhaps evolved because there is a high level of natural acidity in German white wine, especially from riesling, and it was only relatively recently that wineries began to cold-stabilise their white wines to prevent the deposition of unstable acids in the bottle, causing the presence of what Germans would quaintly refer to as ‘wine diamonds’. If this was a common occurrence, as indeed it was, then a tall, narrow bottle would provide an ideal means by which a wine could be poured while leaving these crystals or ‘diamonds’ inside the bottle, where they belong! This tall shape has since become synonymous the world over with the riesling variety.
The final shape to consider is the Champagne bottle. It’s basically quite similar to the Burgundy shape, but has a large punt (or cavity) beneath. This is because the sparkling wine of Champagne could only ever have been invented after the time that wine began to be packaged into glass bottles, but if a traditional flat-bottomed bottle was used for the job, it lacked the inherent strength not to explode as a result of the gas pressure within. This was back when glass technology was pretty basic, so the only way to strengthen the weak region at the bottom of the bottle was to fold the glass back in on itself, creating the punt (click here for more info in this) which provided a shape strong enough to withstand the gas pressure developed as a result of the Champagne process. Modern glass doesn’t really need the punt at all, even for the most effervescent sparkling wine, but the punt has since become a popular element of wine fashion, even for still white and red wines.
