s Wine bottle, 1670-1680 - Hull Museums Collections

Wine bottle, 1670-1680

This bottle once held wine. Glass containers only began to be used for wine at the start of the 1600s. Before that wine was stored in wooden barrels and customers collected wine to take away in leather or pottery jugs.

This is a ‘sealed bottle’ because it has a circular seal on its side containing its owner’s initials, WH. Wealthy men liked to collect wines in specially made bottles marked with their name or initials.

This bottle’s seal was made by applying a small globule of molten glass during manufacture. The globule was then stamped with a metal seal. Seals might bear the owner’s name, initials or crest, the name of a town or village, or the date.

Seals were first used on bottles by wealthy men in the mid-1600s. They had their wine bottles refilled at local taverns, so seals allowed them to keep their own bottles. Eventually inns, wine merchants, distillers and shipping agents had their own seals for bottles too.

The shape of wine bottles has evolved over time, from the ‘shaft and globe’ type to the straight-sided cylindrical bottles we use. This is a very early example of an ‘onion type’ bottle. It is called an onion type because of its onion-shaped body. The first onion bottles appeared around 1670.

The ‘shaft and globe’ bottle first appeared around 1630. It had a very long neck, which made it unstable. Over time the neck became shorter and the body widened to an onion shape, like this one. Onion bottles reached their widest around 1715. From the onion type, bottles developed into a ‘mallet shape’ with a squarer body. From then on, wine bottles became taller and thinner with each decade.

The glass that onion bottles are made from is often called ‘black glass’ because it is so dark. In fact, onion bottles are made from dark greenish-brown glass. This bottle’s true colour can be seen when it’s held up to the light.