Second Birth of the Bottle (18th century)

The recovery during the summer of 2010 of a batch of bottles of champagne from the first half of the nineteenth century, found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic, is a reminder that the great European beverage trade was marked by the abandon of wood barrels in favour of glass bottles. This fundamental shift began in the eighteenth century, in a context marked simultaneously by the rise of quality wines, as well as technical progress in glassmaking.