The Bottle’s Beginnings

We have grown so used to bottled wine that we perhaps forget that wine bottles are a relatively recent invention. For most of wine’s history, it was sold (and often consumed) directly from barrel. The first wine in the world to be successfully commercially sold in cylindrical bottles was Port, sometime around 1775. Indeed, the advent of the cylindrical bottle permitted the style of Vintage Port to be born, since the wine could now by laid down in bins for long periods of maturing and aging.