French Wine Bottle made in the 1700s (Reproduction)

Bottle 1 was reproduced from eighteenth-century (1700-1800) fragments excavated by archaeologists at the site of the colonial Illinois village of Cahokia The bottle was made by Glass Elite, a company that specializes in producing hand-blown, reproduction glass objects.

To make this bottle, the people at Glass Elite followed the same procedure that French bottlemakers used in the 1700s. The resulting dark green, hand-blown bottle is characteristic of the wine bottles shipped from France to New Orleans and Illinois for people on the French Frontier.

1. Sand and wood ash are melted in giant iron pots placed on a red-hot flame to form molten glass. Sand could be made from a variety of crushed rocks ranging from very expensive to very cheap. The cheaper the sand, the greener the glass.
2. The assistant gathers a mass of molten glass on the end of a hollow blowing pipe and inflates it like a soap bubble into a mold. Molds enabled bottlemakers to mass-produce bottles that held the same amount of liquid.
3. The assistant transfers the bottle from the blower's pipe to the pontil-iron.
4. The pontil-iron is used to support the bottle while the glassmaker forms the neck of the bottle. The pontil-iron is also used to push the base of the bottle up into its interior, forming the "Kick-up." The kick-up served two purposes: to make the bottle stronger and to catch the dregs of the wine--solid matter left over from the wine-making process.
5. The bottle is removed from the pontil-iron, leaving a pontil scar on the base of the bottle, and then left to harden as the glass cools.

• the color and texture of the glass
• the pontil-scar on the base of the bottle
• the base or "kick-up" of the bottle

You can click on the bottle to get a closer look.

© Illinois State Museum 31-Dec-96