The bottle of wine: story of a revolution

• Author: JEAN-ROBERT PITTE
• Publisher: Taillandier
• French language
• Publication date: 01/2022
• Number of pages: 318
• Dimensions: 12x18 cm
• Weight: 300g
• Format: soft cover
• ISBN: 9791021002852

Presentation:

Through their shapes which vary over time and from one region to another, wine bottles tell a fascinating story. This innovative work shows it with great science and verve. Wines could never have aged away from air and light and the personality of terroirs and vintages could never have been revealed with such brilliance without the invention of the bottle. The revolution dates from the 1st century AD, with the development of the blowing cane.

At the beginning of the 17th century, European production, too fragile, could not be used to move liquids over long distances. It was then that an importing country, England, produced the bottle in thick, black glass, produced in an oven heated with coal. The same English discovered in Portugal the virtues of cork which allows hermetic corking and to entrust the bottles with quality wine, to store them, transport them and preserve them.

Soon they still invented sparkling champagne that the French would not make until the Regency. Bottles from across the Channel are onion-shaped, pear-shaped, then cylindrical with squarer shoulders. French women are rather ovoid, with drooping shoulders, both in Champagne and Burgundy and in Bordeaux where, in the 19th century, the cylindrical shape with square shoulders became established. Alongside these two major models, certain vineyards have imagined others: the Rhine flute, the straw flask from Tuscany, the gourd-shaped bocksbeutel from Franconia, the clavelin from Jura, the small bottle with an elongated neck from Tokaji or South African constantia, etc.

The author:

President of the Geographical Society and the French Wine Academy, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Jean-Robert Pitte is the author of numerous works on cultural history and geography. Among his latest publications, we can cite 'The Desire of Wine to Conquer the World' (2009), 'A European Family' (2011), the 'History of the French Landscape' (1983), 'Wine and the Divine' (2004) and 'Bordeaux-Bourgogne.
Rival Passions' (2007). For 30 years he has been carrying out extensive research on the geography of gastronomy and wine.

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