🍾 Wine containers, glassware and serving

Wine containers, glassware and serving cover everything wine is aged, shipped, sold and poured in, from the barrel and the bottle to the glass on your table. The group brings together winery vessels, retail packaging and the tools of good service.

For ageing, EU rules allow oak only. An Oak barrel lets a little oxygen through the pores of the wood, so the wine changes slowly. A classic barrique holds 225 litres, while sherry matures in 600-litre casks of US oak. Alongside barrels, wineries rely on the Stainless steel tank and the Concrete vat.

The 750 ml Wine bottle is just one of eight sizes the EU permits for still wine, from 100 to 1,500 ml. Sparkling wine has five permitted sizes, and the «yellow wine» of the Jura is bottled only in 620 ml. Champagne's large formats carry biblical names: a Solomon holds 18 litres, the equivalent of 24 bottles. Bag-in-box is a cardboard carton with a flexible bag and a tap, typically 3–20 litres; it accounts for 3.6% of world wine exports by volume.

A wine cork is cut from the bark of the Cork oak. More than half of its volume is air, and a single stopper contains about 800 million cells. Portugal supplies roughly 46% of the world's cork, about 85,000 tonnes a year.

The Wine glass has grown a lot over three centuries: in England its average capacity rose from 66 ml in the 1700s to 449 ml in 2016–17. Serving temperature matters just as much: reds are served at 15–18 °C, most whites and rosés at 4–10 °C. A Decanter comes in handy for old Vintage Port, which throws a sediment as it ages in bottle.