Glass Bottle and Cork

Coal Instead of Wood Transforms Glass

In 1615, King James I, urged on by Admiral Robert Mansell, banned the continued use of wood-fired furnaces in English glassworks. The country needed its forests for shipbuilding. From then on, glassmakers had to use coal. At first, this seemed like a step backward, since coal furnaces were considered dirtier and harder to control than the familiar wood fire.

In fact, however, coal produced significantly higher temperatures than wood. In the 1630s, the inventor Kenelm Digby combined these hotter furnaces with an altered mixture of sand, potash, and lime. The result was thicker, darker, and above all much sturdier glass. It could withstand the pressure of a fermenting liquid instead of simply shattering like the thin glass used before. This new English bottle, often dark green or almost black, was soon produced in large quantities and exported across the Channel.

The Cork Makes a Comeback

Alongside the sturdier bottle, cork became the standard closure in England from the middle of the century onward. The Romans had already known this technique, but it had largely been forgotten since then. Merchants decanted freshly delivered wine from barrels into these new, thick bottles. They sealed them with corks instead of merely covering the wine loosely with wax or cloth.

This combination of glass and cork allowed wine, for the first time since antiquity, to be stored lying down for years without spoiling or leaking. This exact property was the precondition for wine being able to age in the bottle at all. Before that, it had to be drunk fresh, almost as soon as it left the barrel. Stored on its side, the cork also stayed moist and swelled slightly, sealing the bottle even more tightly than it would standing upright.

Wine merchants in London began bottling their best barrels themselves instead of passing them on unchanged to innkeepers. They marked the bottles with their own seals made of glass or wax. This gave rise, almost incidentally, to an idea: a merchant personally vouched for the quality of their bottling. This notion carries through to today's wine estates that bottle their own wine.

An Accident That Trapped Bubbles

Some wines from cooler regions like Champagne undergo a second fermentation in spring. As soon as warmer temperatures return, leftover sugar and yeast become active again. In old, fragile bottles, this often caused glass to shatter throughout entire cellar rows. For a long time, this unwanted second fermentation was therefore seen as a flaw to be avoided at all costs.

The new, sturdier English bottles, along with the cork, could withstand this pressure, however, and simply trapped the resulting carbon dioxide in the wine. The English scientist Christopher Merret already described this principle in 1662, in a lecture before the Royal Society in London: deliberately adding sugar before sealing the bottle to produce bubbles. This was six years before the monk Dom Pérignon even began working in Champagne.

A Monk Becomes a Legend

Dom Pérignon was a Benedictine monk who served as cellar master of the Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668 until his death in 1715. To this day, many consider him the inventor of Champagne. This story, however, is largely a myth. A later successor embellished it in the nineteenth century to make the abbey more famous and boost its reputation.

In fact, Pérignon mainly improved the technique of blending different grapes and championed sturdier corks, which held better than the cloth stoppers commonly used before. He did not invent the bubble in the glass, yet his name stuck to it. The actual technical foundation, glass and cork from England, faded almost completely from collective memory. The legend was embellished above all by a successor named Dom Groussard. In 1821, he wrote a report about Pérignon in which he also attributed to him other, barely substantiated abilities, in order to make the abbey more appealing to visitors and buyers.

This stop on the journey therefore ends with a double image. On one side stands a real technical revolution from English glassworks, on the other a literary figure who later claimed it for himself. Both stories belong together, even though only one of them actually unfolded in workshops and cellars.