About bottles, wines and, colors

Fortunately for our abused nature, glass is a highly recyclable material, if not made it would take up to 4000 years to biodegrade. In order to recycle it, it is essential to separate it by color: once it has been colored in a certain shade, it will never be transparent again. Switzerland and Ireland are among the few countries in the world that do this conscientiously.

It is rewarding and much cheaper to use the waste from bottles and jars over and over again: all you have to do is add a small percentage of sand. They are melted at lower temperatures, which generates fewer toxic emissions. In addition, recycled glass is cheaper, can be reused as often as you like and, always retains its quality.

We know that the raw material for glass is sand which, when mixed with lime and soda and melted at high temperatures – between 1400° C and 1600° C – results in a glassy paste. From there, we work with different methods to give it different shapes and colors, and after adding lead oxide and other elements we manage to manufacture what we call “glass”. There are also natural crystals, not manufactured by men, such as rock crystal and quartz. Ice, salt, sugar, and precious stones are chemically crystals. We also find them in compounds called organics, such as in proteins, DNA, and wow! in viruses. The basic glass from sand is blue-green due to the metal oxides present in it. To remove impurities and make it transparent, “glassmaker’s soap” is added, which is only manganese in small amounts. If we want to color the glass, we have to add chemicals according to the tone and intensity we want to obtain: it will be cobalt oxide for blue, silver for yellow, copper and iron for green, and so on.

But let’s talk about bottles, this time about the continent and not the contents. In the case of wine, a bottled product for excellence, the color of the bottles is of the utmost importance. Clear or transparent glasses -used for young wines: white and rosé- only protect them in 10% of the ultraviolet light. Green glasses, for red wines, have a protection level of 60%. The range from amber to black is usually reserved for wines that require great protection, up to 90%, preserving them from all radiation and even from fluorescent light. It is used for sherry, port, and sweet liqueurs.

The form is purely aesthetic and, according to the winemakers, irrelevant to what is inside. It is said that the concave cavity at the base is made so that sediment is deposited there and provides greater resistance to the sparkling wines.  By the shape of the bottle we associate the wine to the area where it originated: the Bordeaux or from Bordeaux, the type of bottle used by more winemakers in the world, has a shorter neck and high shoulders, different from the Burgundy bottle which is wider and with “droopy” shoulders or the stylized Rhine bottle, for the German Riesling. The champagne bottle, used by all sparkling wines, is similar to the Burgundy bottle but with thicker glass to withstand the pressure of the carbon dioxide.

Finally, a mention to the drink that seems to beat wine in antiquity: beer.  We note that most bottles are amber or dark brown and the reason is that in contact with light, even that of the refrigerator, the hop acids contained in the beer decompose and cause it to acquire a pronounced bitter taste and a very unpleasant smell… of skunk.