Although wine has been around for millennia, the packaging that is familiar today is a relative novelty, discovers Stephen Bayley.
Since taste and smell are located in the parts of the brain next to the bits that process memory, few things are as dramatically evocative as wine. The extraction of a cork is not just the beginning of dinner, it is the start of a small romantic adventure. And when the delicious and aromatic beverage comes in a handsome bottle adorned with a label that is cheerful, dignified and informative, you have a perfectly packaged experience that engages both the senses and the intellect.
We no longer see so many of them, but the raffia-wrapped fiasco of chianti summarises many of our expectations of Italy. The King's Road operators of the Fifties and Sixties who created the London trattorias recognised this - perhaps inspired by the illustrations in Elizabeth David's books by, first, John Minton and then Renato Guttuso, who so artfully recognised and projected the English fascination with the lands of the Mediterranean and their cooking.
It may be an overused word, but for the first generation of package-holiday travellers, a flask of chianti became an icon. In the same way, Mateus Rosé - a thin and humble Portuguese wine - was adroitly exploited by trade associations and marketeers as a symbol of sophistication. Here, its distinctive bottle shape, vaguely suggestive of an early 18th-century flask, played a significant part. With these historical associations emphasised by an architectural illustration on the label, the sanction of the past was acquired for a product whose cultural roots are not so much with brute Douro peasants as with After Eight mints and a ploughman's lunch.
The bottle of wine has such a prominent position in the landscape of our appetite that it is a shock to realise how late in human history it arrived. During the middle ages, cupbearers used to bring sloshing full goblets to the banqueting table and return (often) to the barrel to replenish the empty ones. Glass bottles may have appeared first in the Levant because wood suitable for barrels was scarce in the southern Mediterranean, but in Europe it was rare for wine to be matured in bottles before the 19th century. Bottles existed before industrialisation, but they were convenient vessels rather than branded packages.
The evolution of the familiar shapes seems to have started in Holland in the 17th century and then moved to England in the following one. In Samuel Pepys's tavern, a typical wine bottle was a dumpy dark blob with a long, attenuated neck, its sinister opacity appropriate to a container for so variable and occasionally menacing a product. Then there was the problem of corks. In his Directions to Servants, Jonathan Swift made fun of clumsy butlers struggling to open bottles - a process so difficult that it was generally considered easier to break the neck off, giving us the expression 'cracking a bottle of wine'. In William Hogarth's paintings and prints we can see the evolutionary process, driven by experimental English glassmakers, that resulted in standardisation: necks became shorter and the bodies more regular and slender.
The claret bottle, with its characteristic squared-off shoulders and 75cl capacity, was established by the mid-19th century. Burgundy had more feminine curves, but was always made in a distinctive green glass that the French poetically call feuilles mortes. But the existence of the bottles did not mean that a recognisable product was available or guaranteed to appear in them. On Bordeaux estates, at least, the custom was to mature wine in enormous wooden barrels known as cuves. When it was ready for drinking, the maître de chai - or cellar master - would bottle it en carafe for drinking at table. Other than that, drays took barrels of wine off to merchants in the city who would then bottle it themselves. The existence of something called the Bureau de la Répression des Fraudes tells you all you need to know about levels of confidence and enthusiasm in the wine trade.
The term 'branding' had not yet been coined, but it was at this time that one of the great commercial adventures began: the design of wine. The Rothschild family had bought the famous Mouton estate in 1853, but it wasn't until the inheritance of Baron Philippe de Rothschild in 1923 that recognisably modern methods were applied. With a banker's eye, he could see that, while Bordeaux production might have reached giddy aristocratic heights of refinement by the time of Napeoleon III's great classification of 1855, its distribution, sales and marketing were in the early Pleistocene era.
Even great wines such as Mouton were sold as commodity products without any 'corporate identity' - another term not then available even to the erudite. One result of this was a popular disaffection for the fruit of the vine: rich Frenchmen often drank whisky with their dinner, while in modest restaurants wine was given away in carafes. At the same time, Rothschild (who may have been aware that the greatest business system known to man was Coca-Cola, a company that had exercised total control over its appearance since the 1916 design of its own famous contour bottle) could see, as he blasted down the N10 between Angoulème and Bordeaux in his Bugatti, advertisements appearing beside the road for new branded drinks: Suze, St Raphaël and Quinquina. Wine was under threat.
So he decided to modernise it, to turn agricultural grape juice into what business schools would later call a premium-priced branded product. His perception was simple, brilliant and totally radical. Instead of selling wine in bulk to merchants, who might mix it with Algerian red ink or Neapolitan dried blood, he would control not only the manufacture of Mouton's product, but also its presentation. He decided to bottle it himself and said, with disarming clarity: "We'll call it château bottling."
To do this, he needed a clearly identifiable label, so Rothschild cleverly commissioned the poster designer Jean Carlu, a member of the Union des Artistes Modernes, to create Mouton's logo of ram's head and arrow. A new age of wine was begun. Imposing the estate's identity on its product in chateau bottling did two things: guaranteed the quality of the product for the consumer and, simultaneously, did important image-building work for the château itself.
This brilliant business initiative caused outrage in the jealous and provincial wine world. Maurice Healy, bibulous author of Stay Me With Flagons, denounced it as a "bolshevik plot", but there was more to come. Not satisfied with the creation of a corporate identity for wine, Rothschild then went into brand extension. Regulations limited the production of classified wines such as Château Mouton-Rothschild, so Baron Philippe started toying with the idea of what was going to be called Junior Mouton. The name was changed and in 1928 Mouton Cadet went onto the market. Creating a deliberate ambivalence between 'proper' single vineyard claret and blends, this was the origin of the world of clearly identified and 'designed' wines we enjoy today.
Rothschild's development of the labels continued, translating the simple etiquette into a manifesto and a credo. In 1934, Mouton started listing its volume of production (in terms of number of jeroboams, magnums, bottles and half-bottles) on its labels, allowing an aready distinguished wine to annex some of the character of rare books or limited fine-art editions. In 1935 Philippe de Rothschild put his own signature on the label for the first time and immediately after the second world war he began another brilliant graphic innovation: astutely recognising the interest artists tend to have in drinking, each year he commissioned a label by a great painter or draftsman. Château bottling now included the aura not just of a noble Bordeaux estate, but also the various associations of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Paul Delvaux and Andy Warhol.
Champagne bottles also have an evocative presence of more seductive power than a Tetrapak of uht milk, but, like claret, the shape was the product of vernacular evolution rather than designer intervention. Half the story of classic champagne is practical: from the time of Dom Pérignon the form evolved from being squat and round - like an Armagnac bottle - to being more slender, the better to allow the fiddling around in the process of remuage. But other considerations seem to have lent symbolic force to the culture of champagne: the classic flat-chested coupe, or dish, was originally moulded in Sèvres porcelain from the breast of Marie Antoinette (and was originally, with hilarious appropriateness, a decoration of the Queen's Dairy Temple at Rambouillet). And in the bottle itself some, including the magisterial Patrick Forbes, see a sexual element as well. In his book, Champagne (Gollancz, 1967), Forbes says that the reconciliation of the practical with the distinctly phallic is a "measure of the Champenois' ingenuity": form and function in nice harmony. No wonder champagne has a hedonistic reputation.
The familiar wine bottles are a product of industrial rationalisation, a process that was complete by the late 19th century. Although boutique wineries in the New World and the more adventurous champagne houses occasionally attempt embarrassing innovations - more slender necks here, gilding or plating there - all efforts to improve on the classic claret, burgundy or champagne shapes have failed. The great bottles are classics of design without designers. Instead, the scope for creativity is in the labels.
These days, the shelves of a supermarket wine department are like a miniature museum of international graphic design. And it's a competitive museum too. South American polychrome machismo here, Californian cool there. The traditional ecclesiastical dignity of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, like a priest's vestments, contrasting with the stern authority of Echezeaux. You get Mouton-Rothschild's Tate Modern rubbing shoulders with shocking modern graphics from Sardinia. The thing about the design of wine is that taste works on the eye as well as the tongue.