Posted on: Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Tell a bordeaux from a burgundy by its bottle
By William Rice
Chicago Tribune
In the game of winemanship, where a peek at the label is worth a thousand sips, tasters give the bottle itself a once-over.
Visit even the most mundane of wine displays in a store or market and you will see bottles with an astonishing variety of shapes, sizes and colors. To the initiated, there are a series of signposts here.
As with so much wine culture, it is best to begin in France.
Tall bottles with straight sides and high shoulders that create a formal appearance are known as bordeaux bottles. Those made of green glass contain red wine—most often cabernet sauvignon and its blends. When the glass is clear, the wine will be white.
The other dominant shape is a stocky, broad, usually pale-green bottle with sloping shoulders. This is the burgundy bottle, reflecting, perhaps, the stalwart quality of Burgundians and their wines. In Burgundy, wine producers use green glass for red or white. This shape travels well. It is used for chardonnay and pinot-noir wines the world around, and is the favored shape in the Rhone Valley, regions of Italy and Spain.
A rhine bottle is narrow, tapered, spirelike. The color of a bottle of German wine telegraphs whether the wine is from the Rhine River Valley (brown) or the Mosel (green). This shape is used for riesling-style wines produced in many nations.
No one is quite sure why the different shapes took hold in Bordeaux, Burgundy and Germany. There is little or no evidence that wines age better in one shape bottle or another, though larger bottles appear to age more slowly than small, and colored glass is more protective than clear.
Nor is the association of bottle type and grape variety infallible. Even within a shape or style, bottles may differ in size and weight. (Witness the macho competition among some producers in California, Italy and Spain to market their wines in outsized, very heavy bottles.) Slope-shouldered champagne bottles are strong and heavy and have deep punts because the wine inside exerts considerable pressure on the bottle.
