In the beginning...
Wine was fermented in open top fermenters and stored in sealed clay jars. The youngest wine was the best, because the wine began to oxidize almost immediately unless you added resin or some other substance to help protect it. Young wine was good, and light, fresh wines were probably tastiest. And consumed quickly—because it spoiled easily and quickly
And then Julius Caesar invaded Gaul...and discovered the barrel.
Barrels
The history of barrels in winemaking is an old one. The earliest records from Sumer show wine being shipped in barrels made of palm tree trunks. These could not have been large, perhaps holding only a few gallons, and the palm tree would not have given much flavor to the wine. But once the art of ceramics was discovered, barrels probably disappeared for millennia.
Most of the ancient world shipped its wines in either animal skins or jars. The jars have become a wonderful source of information for archeologists, who analyze the contents and learn much about early wining and dining habits. But they also recognize that much of the wine must have been shipped and served from animal skins--and none of these have survived the ages. Both would probably have been treated with pitch to prevent leaking, and that pitch gave a distinctive flavor to the wine.
In the early days of the Roman Empire, amphorae are found throughout their lands, sometimes indicating a wine trade that ranged over thousands of miles. But from the time of Julius Caesar onwards, this trade seems to dwindle. The amphorae are no longer found in large numbers.
This is because Caesar brought back from Britain the wooden barrel. This may have been a Celtic invention, based on a primitive bucket, but it was a much stronger shipping container than any ceramic vessel could be. And because it, too, deteriorates with time, we have little evidence of barrels other than the metal hoops.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, trade in Europe became a much riskier business. Trade routes that had existed for centuries became impossible, and the fragmentation of city-states made it infinitely more complicated. As a result, wines were shipped less, and barrels became less important.
But with the advent of the great trading era that began in the Rennaissance, barrels once again became the preferred method of shipping wine. And over time, winemaker learned that different woods performed very differently with the wine. Chestnut wood imparted little flavor to the wine, while oak gave a sweet vanilla character.
Today, it is rare to find a fine wine that does not see some oak aging. There is great debate in winemaking circles about the way the barrels should be made. Each forest produces wood with a slightly different grain and flavor. Barrel staves can be toasted, charred, or steamed. Barrels can be larger or smaller, fatter or thinner, older or newer. But every winemaker has an opinion about the best barrels for his wine.
Barrels impart two critical characteristics to wine. New oak barrels give a strong rich vanilla character to any wine, and as the barrels get older, that character gets more delicate. At the same time, barrels allow for a very slow oxidation of the wine—developing bouquet and complexity. The winemaker often blends wines from new and old barrels to get exactly the combination of flavor and oxidation that will best show the quality of the wine.
Glass Bottles and Corks!
Glass Bottles
When did the wine industry start using glass bottles, and how did they settle on their current size of 750ml? For the answer to these questions, you have to go back in time - back thousands of years to when wine was first cultivated and enjoyed.
Back in the days of Mesopotamia and Egyptian winemaking, the winemakers saved their wares in amphorae - clay flasks. These were stamped with the vineyard's name, the vintage of the wine, type of wine, and so on. This went on for thousands of years, through the Grecian days of wine trade, until the Romans grew to power.
The Romans developed sophisticated glass blowing. Glass was quickly found to be a good medium for storing wine - it did not affect the wine's flavor, you could easily see what wine was inside the bottle, and so on. The trouble was with the method of manufacture. Glass at the time was hand blown, and it was difficult to make larger bottles. Roman glass was usually used for perfumes and other, more valuable liquids, rather than wine. In addition, bottles varied wildly in size. Consumers never knew exactly how much wine they were getting. It was illegal to sell wine in bottles because of these problems.
Over the following years it was realized that although barrels were excellent vehicles for transporting wine, wine that is put into tightly corked bottles not only lasts longer but it matures and acquires its distinctive bouquet. It was also realized that if a bottle is tightly corked it can also be stored on its side thus keeping the cork moist and improving the seal.
The 17th. and 18th. Century bottles were known as "shaft and globe" or "onion" because of the shape of the body and neck and these were stoppered with a tapered cork bound with wax linen. They stood upright on the shelf. Everyone is familiar with the bottles of today with their straight-sided corks. It is these corks that provided the need for an instrument to remove them in order to drink the contents of the bottle.
Time went on, and colored glass and various sizes and shapes were experimented with. Bottles originally were onion shaped, as this was easy to blow, but it was found that a longer, flatter shape was better for storing wine on its side, which helped it age properly and keep the cork wet. Bottles ended up being around 700ml to 800ml as an easy to carry size that was easily made.
In the 1800s the industry found ways of making standard sized bottles, and regions began to settle on what they found was the ideal bottle size for their wines. Some chose 700ml, others 750ml, and so on. The maximum "standard" bottle size was around 800ml, although magnums and other special sizes did exist.
Up until around 1945, wines from Burgundy and Champagne often came in 800ml bottles, with various other similar sizes used for other regions and countries. Beaujolais was known for its 500ml "pot".
In 1979 the US set a requirement that all bottles be exactly 750ml as part of the push to become Metric. That is almost exactly the same amount of alcohol as an "American Fifth". Around the same time the European Union also asked winemakers to settle on one size to help with standardization. The 750ml size has become adopted by many countries, so the winemakers could ship to the US with ease.
Over the following years it was realized that although barrels were excellent vehicles for transporting wine, wine that is put into tightly corked bottles not only lasts longer but it matures and acquires its distinctive bouquet.
Corks
Cork's first recorded use as a stopper - and its most common use today - was by the Egyptians thousands of years ago. Ancient Greeks also used cork oak bark to make fishing buoys, sandals and stoppers for vessels for wine and olive oil. The Romans found many uses for cork, including the construction of house roofs and beehives, in ship construction and for women's shoes. They also used it to seal small glass bottles—but only for perfumes and cosmetics, not for wine.
In the 1600s, a French monk called Dom Pérignon, took a giant step towards the modern, most widespread use of cork - as a wine closure. Containers holding sparkling wine traditionally had been plugged by wooden stoppers wrapped in olive oil-soaked hemp. Dom Pérignon observed that these stoppers often popped out. He successfully swapped the conical plugs for cork stoppers and cork soon became essential for wine bottling.
This changed the world of wine. It was discovered that wines will improve with age in the bottle, and winemakers started to change the style of their wines, so that they would capture more of the elegance and longevity that the cork made possible. The most important and famous wines of our times owe their style to cork closures.
Fuelled by a rapidly growing wine industry, demand for cork increased, sending ripples into Catalonia in Spain. The world's first cork stopper factory opened in around 1750, in Anguine (Spain) marking the beginning of the industrial application of cork. Cork stoppers arrived in Portugal around 1700. Some 70 years later they were used in cylindrical bottles in Oporto, allowing the wine to mature slowly in a glass receptacle for the first time.
The spread of mass-produced glass bottles with a uniform neck and opening helped to advance the acceptance of cork stoppers, not just for wine but a wide range of liquids.
Production boomed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1890 and 1917, the industry's workforce more than doubled and by 1930 it had increased fivefold, to a total of 10,000 workers. By this time Portugal had become the world's leading cork producer, a position it holds to this day.
The current situation is vastly more complicated. A significant percentage of all wines are spoiled by a chemical called 2,4,6 Trichloroanisole, or TCA. It is formed when mold comes into contact with any form of chlorine, from chlorinated water to penta-chlorophenols. It is extremely penetrating, and affects such food products as raisins, chocolate, sherbet, coffee, and almost all bottled products from wine to beer and water. Because cork can harbor mold spores, and because cork can absorb TCA, TCA has become the bane of the cork industry’s existence. Plastic stoppers, screw caps, and all variations of cork processing are currently being explored as a solution to the problem.
According to the Australian Wine Research Institute, each of the closures presents some kind of quality control problem, and some also present problems of consumer resistance. In the end, the closure that solves all of these problems will be the long term solution.
Corkscrews!
In the Portrait Gallery of Berlin hangs an altar frontal entitled "The Wine Miracle of St. Bertin of St. Marmion", part of which depicts the use of a barrel borer. This common piece of equipment is the forerunner of the corkscrew.
Like many good things in life, wine improves with age and man has improved on the raw ingredients. Since the earliest records wine has been made for man's delight.
Since the ancient Egyptians, wine has been stored in many utensils animal skins, earthenware jars and wooden barrels. Many of these containers were stoppered with bungs of wood or cork. This was freely available in Mediterranean countries and the container would have been easily broached with a sharp blow. Once open however, the wine would have had only a short life.
Corks were used in ancient times to stopper a sorts of containers--but the only use for corks in combination with glass would have been for cosmetics, not wine. This use of cork ceased along with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Over the centuries, it became clear that a good purchase was necessary on the cork in order to remove it from the tight grip of the neck of the bottle. Twisted metal was considered to be suitable but the type of metal and how it was manufactured was the puzzle. Even today it is apparent that there are two distinct types of screw or worm - the smooth metalled helix and the sharp-edged Archimedian - each having their own devotees. The Archimedian worm is so called because of its resemblance to Archimedes' water-screw.
The very early corkscrews were manufactured by the gunsmiths of the day and records have shown that they were included in the City of London's livery companies amongst the Worshipful Company of Loriners. The Loriners were not gunsmiths, however but makers of horse bits and spurs. One of the earliest illustrations of a corkscrew in use can be seen in the 1773 publication entitled "The Presentation of Human Recreation" by Tim Bobbin.
The first corkscrew is attributed to the end of the 18th Century but the heyday of corkscrews coincided with the great period of British manufacturing and invention, the middle of the 19th Century. At that time men of vision were competing with each other to register patents for all manner of inventions and the corkscrew was included in these endeavours. The first patent registered was to Samuel Henshall in 1795. The rise of the corkscrew is illustrated by the fact that between that time and the beginning of the 20th Century, over 300 corkscrew patents were registered. It is these corkscrews that have become the subject of antique corkscrew collectors the world over.
As corkscrews became more common the materials used changed. Manufacturers introduced the use of more expensive metals including gold, bronze and silver. Other materials such as bone, ivory, enamel and other forms of decoration were pressed into use.
However, wine bottles were not the first bottles to be corked. Bottle tops and cans did not become common until after W.W.II. Before that time and before wine was ever corked, all kinds of substances were often stored in corked containers: beer, medicine, cosmetics and food. Many of these corked items required small corkscrews.
"It is unknown when and who made the first corkscrew. The first corkscrews were derived from a gun worme, a tool with a single or double spiral end fitting used to clean musket barrels or to extract an unspent charge from the barrel. ( Doesn't THAT sound exciting?) By the early 17th century corkscrews for removing corks were made by blacksmiths as using a cork to stopper a bottle was well established."
So corkscrew inventors were inspired by a tool called the bulletscrew or gun worm, a device that extracted stuck bullets from rifles.
Microbiology
You can thank Louis Pasteur for this one. He discovered that much of what happens in winemaking is due to micro-organisms that can be controlled: yeast, Brettanomyces, etc.
Winemaking got a lot more consistent. And enology classes got a lot more complicated.
We don't have time to teach an entire class on micro-biology here, but let's just say that this changed wine forever. Things like yeast and bacteria were suddenly studied, understood, and sometimes even controlled. And that changed wine forever.
Yeast behaves differently at different temperatures. Cooler fermentations not only progress more slowly, they also volatilize fewer aromatic compounds. Warmer fermentations extract more phenolics from the grapes, making for richer and more structured wines. And vintage variations matter far less today than ever before---because we can control what happens.
And that led to tanks...and temperature controlled fermentations...
Tanks
In the early part of this century, an Australian winemaker began to experiment with varying the temperature of different fermentations. He discovered something that every woman had known since before history began. Cold temperatures inhibit yeast. The slow the yeast down, and this, in turn, creates a slightly different kind of fermentation. Any woman who made bread in 3000 BC knew this. But it took a man to write a paper about it.
At the time, however, energy costs were so prohibitive that there was no economical way to put these theories into practice. Occasionally, a winemaker faced with an overly hot fermentation would throw a block of ice into the tank, but that was about the extent of the control.
In the middle of the 1900's, research at U.C. Berkeley quantified some of the results. Cold fermentations allowed less of the aroma of the grape to escape, and produced wines that were lighter in style, and fruitier. Warm fermentation extracted more phenolics from the grapes, and created wines that were richer, heavier, and more tannic. At the same time, electric power became easily available and affordable to most regions of the industrialized world.
On the face of it, this was nothing more than another arrow in the arsenal of the winemaker. He (or she) could now adjust the temperature of the fermentation to create the exact style of wine desired. But something else happened as well.
In the days before temperature-controlled fermentations, there was a great deal more vintage variation. Grapes that were picked in perfect conditions might find themselves in an icy cellar due to a cold snap. The resulting wine suffered. In a warmer harvest, grapes that were perfectly ripe might well find themselves in a wildly heated fermentation that coarsened the wine. Even more important was the effect on less that perfect grapes. Cold, rainy harvests followed by more cold, rainy weather created wines of such poor quality that they could not be commercially released.
Those days are over. Wineries have the technology to give every harvest almost perfect conditions for fermentation, and as a result, the days of horrible vintages are over. Now we see lighter style wines made one year, heavier another, but the variation is due only to the grapes themselves, not the weather following harvest. There has not been a disastrous vintage in Bordeaux since the early 1970's.
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