bottles, labeling, and packaging are so much a part of the spirits industry today, forming an integral part of many a product’s identity, that it is difficult to imagine a time when they were an afterthought; something almost entirely unconnected to the distiller’s business. Yet until the second half of the nineteenth century, distillers in most countries sold their products wholesale, by the barrel or large earthenware jar (such as the 10–12 liter pisquitos in which pisco was shipped from Peru to San Francisco). See barrel and pisco. If they sold smaller quantities—in Britain, this was essentially forbidden—it was to the local market, to neighbors who usually supplied their own bottles or jugs or used returnable ones from the distillery. The distillery’s bulk-package customers, who included everything from rectifiers (who would blend and flavor and otherwise monkey with the product), to wine and spirits merchants, saloons and restaurants, and pharmacies, groceries, and department stores, would fill and label their own bottles, either for use behind the bar or for sale over the counter. See rectifier.
There were of course exceptions to this general process. Many Dutch genever distillers and blenders exported their product in square-shouldered “case bottles,” so named because they could be packed together tightly in a case with no wasted space. These often had the distiller’s monogram or logo molded into them. Japanese shochu distillers sold their product in returnable earthenware tokkuri jars, emblazoned with the distillery’s name in large characters. Beginning in the 1690s, London apothecary Richard Stoughton sold and shipped his Magnum Elixir Stomachicum, the progenitor of all modern bitters, in uniform, sealed bottles. See genever; shochu; and Stoughton’s Bitters. For the rest, though, bottles—the spirit’s last-mile container—were the customer’s concern.
From the thirteenth-century revival of the ancient art of glassblowing to the mid-nineteenth century, European spirits bottles came in a few traditional shapes, sized approximately (as any free-blown bottle must be) to one of the measures used in the place they were made or destined for. Such shapes include “shaft and cylinder,” with a long neck on a cylindrical body (some have a long shaft on a short body, others the reverse); “shaft and globe” (a long neck on a globular body with a flattened bottom), and “onion” (the same but with the globe’s bottom further flattened). Other than the case bottles, always associated with gin, the broad-shouldered “flowerpot” bottle preferred for calvados, and the “chestnut” for Armagnac (essentially an onion with flattened sides), most European and American bottle shapes were not closely associated with particular spirits. In Asia, earthenware or porcelain containers were preferred, and these too had traditional shapes. In China, for example, baijiu usually came in small, un-necked cylinders with paper seals over the closures.
mark. Paint and handwritten or printed paper labels were also used. By the early nineteenth century, preprinted labels were increasingly common. Often these had the merchant’s name or mark, but otherwise the information they conveyed was generic, identifying only the type of spirit in the bottle (e.g., “French Brandy,” or “Old Monongahela Whisky”). Since bottle capacity and proof were variable, that information was not included. As the century unfolded, however, the name of the distiller became an increasingly common addition, at least for top-shelf goods. Some distillers even supplied labels with their barrels.The mid-nineteenth century brought advances in bottle-molding, label-printing, and branding, all of which worked together to completely transform the way spirits presented themselves. Bottles could be made in proprietary shapes and, with the introduction of chromolithography, bright, multicolor labels printed cheaply. Rectifiers, merchants, and even distillers were quick to take advantage. Why not emboss a big American eagle on the bottle that contained American peach brandy, or even shape the whole thing like George Washington’s head? And why bottle your blend of various scotch whiskies as, say, “Thomas’s Old Scotch Whisky” with a picture of your shop on the label when you could slap a bright, three-color picture of a Highland glen on the bottle and call it “Thomas’s Dew of Glen Dochart”? By the 1870s, such a name could be trademarked, as could a unique bottle design.
The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of distillery brands, as improved transportation, cheaper bottles, and trademarking made such things worthwhile. Just as some distillers took traditional formulae and made them proprietary, some laid claim to traditional bottle shapes: thus, for example, Bénédictine staked a claim in the flowerpot bottle and Cointreau in the square one. See Bénédictine and Cointreau. Others, such as the French aperitif Suze, created entirely new and distinctive bottles (its bottle was trademarked in 1913). See Suze. Eventually, the taste for novelty subsided somewhat, and considerations of economic efficiency reasserted themselves. The introduction of fully automated bottle making helped that process, with machines such as the one patented in 1903 by Michael Owens of Toledo, Ohio (1859–1923), which could churn out 102,000 bottles a day, revolutionizing the trade. Bottles were now, for the first time, cheap, particularly if one avoided doing anything fancy with them. At the same time, consumer protection laws such as the American Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) placed an effective restraint on what one could claim on a label. In some countries, Prohibitionist sentiment came to tightly constrain trade dress, mandating plain labels and a rigid adherence to the truth (see, for example, Iceland’s Brennvin, an aquavit that is labeled in the severest black by government mandate). See aquavit.
Fanciful packaging had a comeback in the 1960s, with the brightly painted figural holiday gift decanter, which could take on any shape imaginable—a game fish, a distillery, Elvis Presley—and, arguably, saved the American bourbon industry at its time of greatest crisis. See whisky, bourbon.
Today, most spirits are packaged in either standard, off-the-rack bottles (so to speak) or proprietary bottles that are slight variations of them (the smooth, cylindrical, high-shouldered Absolut vodka bottle, for example, or the Tanqueray gin bottle, which is plain enough save for the flange running around its shoulder, designed to make it resemble a cocktail shaker). Bottles that are too unusual can be difficult to ship and challenging for bartenders to fit in their bars. Prestige brands will often encase the basic bottle in a lavishly printed cardboard shipping canister, or even a wooden box. This protects the bottle but also takes up more shelf space in a store, making the brand more visible, and gives the marketing department a greater canvas upon which to practice its art. The more expensive the brand, the more expensive the bottle it goes into and the more lavish the surrounding packaging (although there are exceptions).
The twenty-first century has seen a rise in interest in sustainable packaging. Glass is recyclable, but it is very heavy to ship. The largest bottles have been replaced in some countries by bag-in-box packages, while in parts of Asia and Africa the smaller sizes are often replaced by plastic sachets. In many places, plastic bottles are common, but not for premium spirits, whose marketing tends to rely on appealing to perceptions of status. There is, however, a good deal of experimentation, including things such as the ecoSPIRITS system being tested in parts of Asia, where spirits are delivered to bars in returnable and reusable 4.5-liter mini-totes, from which bottles are refilled for service. As history has taught us, such a system can be very effective.
See also closures and spirits trade, history of.
Albert Pick & Co. General Catalog Enlightening the Hotel, Restaurant and Saloon World. Chicago: Albert Pick, 1913.
Hamilton, Carl. Absolut: Biography of a Bottle. New York: Texere, 2000.
Liang, Alice. “Eco-Friendly Distribution Technology ecoSPIRITS Introduced in Asia.” The Drinks Business, June 29, 2020. https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2020/06/eco-friendly-distribution-technology-ecospirits-introduced-in-asia/ (accessed April 24, 2021).
Moss, Robert F. “The Origins of the Package Store.” Robert F. Moss website, June 4, 2016. https://www.robertfmoss.com/features/The-Origins-of-the-Package-Store (accessed April 24, 2021).
van den Bossche, Willy. Antique Glass Bottles. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001.
By: David Wondrich