Have you ever wondered why certain wines have a distinctive bottle shape? Is the answer something to do with the wine itself, or is it a marketing decision to help people browsing a store quickly pick out the type they want?

This practice dates back to the originators of this wine style, the Germans in the famous wine-growing regions of the Rhine and Mosel in the north of the country. It was their custom to bottle the wines made from Riesling grapes in those distinctive tall, slender ‘gooseneck’ bottles.

When other countries – including Australia – began to grow and make Riesling they looked to its traditional makers in Germany for guidance on bottle type and so the tradition continued and remains today. 

In fact, bottle shape was (and still is) a key indicator of different styles of wine and varied considerably from region to region, especially throughout Europe. So if you headed further down to the south they tended to use the increasingly rare bocksbeutel shape (allegedly named thus because of its resemblance to a goat’s scrotum!). You might be familiar with this shape as it was most famously adopted by the makers of Mateus rose.

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