When did wine bottles become airtight
 

When did wine bottles become airtight



Wine wasn’t always stored in bottles. It was usually in clay pots - amphorae, or wood casks. Both of them had holes to pour the wine into, but they needed closures. Those closures included waxed or greased cloths, skins, and corks. But because the openings were not standardized, the corks had to be pretty much hand made.Get more news about Airtight Bottle,you can vist our website!

When bottles came into popular use, in many cases they were actually outlawed because you can change the volume of a bottle by using a large punt or other tricks that don’t let the buyer judge the wine by visual inspection.

And early bottles were hand blown and mostly they had an onion kind of shape, with a big bulbous bottom and a skinny neck.

What really changed things was a guy named Robert Mansell. He was an admiral in the British navy but he got a patent on melting glass with coal, which made a hotter fire and a better, stronger glass. King James gave him the patent and thought it was interesting that the guy who spent his life at sea was going to be dealing in coal and sand. The king went off to translate the bible and Robert went off to make glass.

This was around 1620. Mansell established glass factories in several places but the first was in Newcastle, where there was a lot of coal.

He had metal molds made. A bit of molten glass would be dropped in, the mold would be closed, and a tube would blow air into the molten glass. It took the shape of the mold and when it cooled, you could open the mold and take out a glass bottle. Those bottles would have a seam down the side where the two halves of the mold were.

With metal molds, you could make dozens or even hundreds of bottles that had the same shape and size. And once you could standardize the bottle shape and width of the bottle, you could manufacture standardized closures.

The material science of the day wasn’t what it is today and they didn’t have materials that could be compressed and that would then spring back to the original shape. In addition, the tolerances weren’t as tight as they are today. Nobody measured in fractions of millimeters.

But cork was known and it could be compressed. It was put into the glass by hammering it, but if you made it just a hair wider than you thought you needed you could pound it in and it would compress. Today we don’t cork bottles that way but the idea is the same.

That was as tight a seal as you were going to get, so you can say that sometime in the early 1600s people came up with a tight seal for a bottle of wine.

Of course, today we have much better material science and better materials, so it’s odd that people will use cork, which has so much wrong with it. The main problem is that cork is unpredictable with any certainty. Each cork is unique and will behave in a unique way.