History: Shape

Early bottles have more or less globular bodies with long conical necks. The form developed (see illustration), becoming lower and wider in Britain, while on mainland Europe the flask-shape with an oval cross-section was popular. From c.1690 to 1720, the outline of a bottle resembled that of an onion—a wide compressed globular body with a short neck. Larger bottles were made too, whose shape resembled an inflated balloon or bladder. It is thought that all these forms were stored in beds of sand. By the 1720s the ‘onion’ became taller and the sides flatter—a form known by collectors as a ‘mallet’. Naturally occurring impurities in the constituent ingredients gave glass an olive green hue which varied from pale to almost black and was beneficial to the bottled wine as it excluded light. Most bottles before 1700 had an applied ring of glass just below the neck which gave an anchorage to the string used to hold in a variety of stoppers. These bottles were of substantial weight and thickness too.