What can the shape of a bottle of wine tell me about its contents?!
What can the shape of a bottle of wine tell me about its contents?
I remember learning about this from a chef I used to work for but I've forgotten what he said about it. Something about slender bottles being sweeter maybe? I don't remember. Any other useful wine facts are appreciated, too.
Answers:
The simple answer is that you cannot tell anything from the bottle.
But of course there are few simple answers here - at least when I am doing the answering :)
In the Europe many wine regions have traditionally shaped -- and sometimes colored -- bottles. The obvious one is Bordeaux versus Burgundy -- first with its own high shouldered bottle, and Burgundy with its sloping shape.
In Germany the tall thin bottles were brown glass for a Rhine wine and green for a Mosel, but the same tall bottles are used for Alsace wines.
However those German wines would have used the same bottles no matter what the sweetness levels were.
Chianti had a globe shaped bottle wrapped in raffia with a support at the base to keep it upright.
That is just a few old world traditions. The new wine world sometimes copy the old shapes to make an identification with the wine styles, but the old wold was changing.
Sweetish German wines in their tall bottles fell out of fashion in the late 1980's and many German wines are now bottled in Bordeaux shaped bottles. Chianti wanted to lose its image of the cheap wines and go upmarket so nowadays only the cheapest Chiantis are bottled in the raffia covered containers and the serious ones use Bordeaux shaped bottles.
In the olden days it was very expensive to make blue glass, and some of the most expensive German wines used them. Now it costs no more to make blue bottles and some wines that pretend to be better than they are are put in blue bottles.
Then there is the oft-told myth that better wines have a deeper punt (kick-up). But all that means is that the bottle is more expensive to buy. So more expensive wines may use them -- but so do cheapo wines that pretend they are expensive.
So -- the truth is that you can tell nothing from the shape of the bottle.
However you can tell nearly everything you need to know from the label that is stuck to the bottle.