Blown away: the story of Claude Boucher, the man behind the bottle
- Alexandr Gorokhovskiy
- Apr 30
- 15 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
The idea that wines and spirits are shipped, marketed, and sold to us in bottles seems obvious with hindsight. But it wasn’t always the case. Read on to discover how Claude Boucher, who lived and worked in Cognac, revolutionized the drinks industry with the invention of the first bottle-making machine.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, liquor was mainly sold in barrels, with customers typically bringing their own jugs to fill from casks at local taverns or shops. Cognac wasn’t an exception – the only notable difference being that, since this drink was considered more high-end, some of its bulk shipments to England were occasionally bottled by importers before reaching the end consumer.
Of course, glass bottles have been around for thousands of years, but due to their high cost and small sizes, they were initially reserved for perfumes and ointments used in cosmetics or medicine and therefore circulated mainly among the upper echelons of society. The blowpipe technique, dating back to the middle of the 1st century AD, made it possible to eventually create more voluminous glass containers, which could be shaped with metal tools while the material remained viscous. However, such bottles were still relatively expensive and, more importantly, very fragile, which limited their widespread use.
Literary and archaeological sources indicate that during Late Antiquity, glass vessels were occasionally used for serving wine, but not for its storage or sale (purposes for which terracotta amphorae remained standard). The Dark Ages, spanning from the 5th to the 10th century, led to a temporary decline in European glassmaking, with much of the technology being forgotten.
It wasn’t until the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204 – an event that led to the relocation of many Byzantine artisans to Venice – that ancient techniques were rediscovered, and the first glass workshops were established on the island of Murano. Over the next few centuries, although the Serenissima remained unrivaled in the quality and reputation of its glassware, the art gradually spread across the continent, and glass carafes and bottles became increasingly common.
Glassworks were opening all over Europe. Of note is the famous Colinet family, who were based in the area along today’s border between France and Belgium. These master glassmakers played a key role in developing bottle manufacturing, producing fine glass vessels for the Habsburg court and other distinguished royal houses. Their expertise in bottle-making contributed significantly to the growing demand for both functional and decorative glassware among Europe’s elite. One of the Colinets, Jean (known also as John Colnett), eventually established himself in England, where he played a pivotal role in developing the English glass industry. His journey reflects a broader pattern: skilled artisans from the continent, displaced by the upheaval of the European wars of religion, brought their knowledge and craftsmanship to England, helping to transform it into one of the leading centres of glass bottle production.
During this period, the wine trade underwent a major transformation. As the Little Ice Age gripped Northern Europe, local production declined sharply, forcing the region to rely entirely on imports from the south. Vineyards with easy access to Atlantic and Mediterranean – such as Bordeaux, the Alto Douro (home of port wine), Jerez, Malaga, Madeira, as well as the ones along the Charente river (known for cognac) – were well-positioned to meet this new demand. Dutch, English, and German merchants established strong trade networks with those areas. From there, they shipped barrels containing wine and spirits to major northern hubs like Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, and Bremen.
At the time, England imported large numbers of stoneware Bartmann jugs (from German Bartmann, "bearded man"), also known as Bellarmines, from the Rhine Valley. However, their bulky shape, opaque material, and limited sealing ability made them inefficient for transport, storage, and long-term preservation. There was a growing need in more practical and solid containers – such as the ones made of glass.
This demand came at a time when the country had already been heavily deforested. King James I, concerned that wood-burning glass furnaces threatened the remaining timber reserves needed for naval shipbuilding and construction, issued a ban on wood-fired glass production in 1615. This move was influenced by Sir Robert Mansell, Treasurer of the Navy, who shared the King’s concerns but also did not neglect his own interests: it just happened that he held a royal monopoly on glass production using coal-fired furnaces and had glassworks established in the coal-rich Newcastle-upon-Tyne region in northern England. Coal allowed for higher furnace temperatures, resulting in stronger glass. Thanks to this innovation, Newcastle became the world’s leading centre for glassmaking for the next two centuries.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, the most common bottle designs at the time were those called ‘shaft and globe’ and ‘onion’, with a semi-spherical shape, a slightly sunken base, and a distinct neck in the shape of a truncated cone – long in the first case, short in the other. Thanks to Protestant refugees from the continent, this model passed to England becoming a defining feature of the local wine trade and, by extension, of international wine commerce, as the English increasingly came to dominate the global market.
Characterized by their rounded, globular bases and long, narrow necks (‘shafts’), these bulbous bottles were typically dark green or brown in color due to fumes from the coal-fired furnaces, which also helped protect their contents from light. Often referred to as ‘the English bottles’, they featured several characteristics that made them ideal for storing and transporting liquids – particularly by sea. The globular base allowed the bottles to be laid on their sides and cushioned in straw, while the thick walls provided durability, and the narrow neck allowed for easy sealing. The English bottle represented a key milestone in mass production and distribution of various alcoholic beverages. For example, reliable and robust glass of the English bottle was strong enough to withstand the internal pressure created by the carbon dioxide, which eventually enabled the production of bottle-fermented ciders and sparkling wines.
The wines of Champagne have been enjoyed in England since the 16th century. They arrived there in barrels by sea, after being transported down the Marne and Seine rivers to Rouen. Back then, the climate was such that it got quite cold very early in the autumn, so the wines had not yet completed their fermentation when they were shipped. From the middle of the 17th century, English merchants adopted the habit of placing the newly arrived wines in thick, black bottles and sealing them with cork. The following spring, the yeasts came into action again and fermentation resumed, which increased the alcohol content but also released carbon dioxide creating the pressure only the solidity of the English glass was able to contain.
Cider producers were also using these bottles quite a lot. Unlike wine, cider was made from native British apples, could be produced over an extended period – since apples can be stored for months without refrigeration – and was more commonly consumed by the general population. As early as the 1660s, bottling cider was fairly widespread in England. Just as with sparkling wines, because ciders undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle, the latter became an important part of the production process for this type of beverage.
In the beginning of the 18th century, sparkling wine began to make inroads into the French market. The first definite mention of it appears in an order placed in 1711 by Marshal Charles de Montesquiou to Adam Bertin du Rocheret, a commission agent from Épernay. The marshal wanted the wine to be mousseseux and stated that “it is always better in a bottle than by the barrel”. Because of the growing popularity of sparkling wines, the production of bottles spread rapidly in Champagne, as was attested by Jean Godinot, canon of Reims, in 1718:
The use of round bottles is very common in Champagne; as there is a lot of wood in the province, many glassworks have been established there, most of which deal only with making bottles.
However, it was only after 1775 that shipments of bottles leaving Épernay exceeded 50,000 units per year. In Reims, the figure stood between 100,000 and 200,000 per year. While this testifies to the fact that the fashion from England had finally taken hold in France, such volumes represent only a very small portion of sparkling wine shipped – still mostly in barrels – from the Champagne vineyards during this time.
France lagged behind England in bottle production not so much due to a lack of glassmaking techniques, but primarily because of excessive local regulations. As demand for sparkling wines surged, manufacturers were tempted to produce smaller bottles than the legal requirements, leading to widespread fraud. To address this issue, a royal declaration was issued in 1735, regulating bottle capacity, weight, glass quality, and thickness (the exception was made only for bottles used for liqueurs, which is a reflection of their relatively limited presence on the broader market). It took time, numerous seizures, and hefty fines for these regulations to be more or less respected, although French glassmakers still continued to cheat on bottle volume at scale. They also skirted weight regulations by elongating bottle necks, which led to significant breakage. As a result, France’s bottle production remained inconsistent and less reliable, hindering its ability to meet the growing demands of the sparkling wine trade with the same industrial efficiency.
As for regular wines, it has already been noted that most were bottled in the cellars of English, Dutch, German, or Parisian importers just before being released to the market. For a long time, it was also common practice to blend different wines prior to bottling, often fortifying them with spirits and adding sugar or other additives. Only when wine merchants began investing in vineyards and moving up the production chain did bottling at source gradually become more widespread – a practice that didn't firmly establish itself until the 19th century.
It was largely thanks to the appearance of clarets, the first widely traded wines intentionally aged and improved by barrel aging, that the practice of having the producer place the wine in bottles for final release began to be truly appreciated. As it turned out, the best vintages of these powerful and tannic wines required several years of maturation in dark, tightly corked bottles to fully reveal their finesse. We have very precise testimonies on this subject from the managers of Château Latour at the turn of the 19th century. One of them, Poitevin, wrote in December 1802 to the Count of La Pallu about that year’s vintage: “It takes six years before it is drinkable and one year in the bottle”. In 1815, another one, Lamothe, considered that the 1807 should finally be bottled, because
there is a term for the barrel beyond which the wine degenerates if we do not take care to put it in the glass where it is better preserved and renewed. The bottle is the salvation of the wine because it is no longer subject to contact with the air.
By the dawn of the Second Empire, the bottle had firmly supplanted the barrel as the preferred vessel for wine storage. Jacques Ferrier, author of Guide du consommateur de bons vin sou essai sur les produits viticoles du département de la Gironde, published in Bordeaux in 1857, recommended having one’s good wine bottled, with bottles to be
placed horizontally, so that the wine touches the cork; [as] without this precaution, the cork dries out, contracts, allows air to escape, and the wine blooms and acidifies.
While uniform bottle shapes were not initially essential – as long as they were somewhat ovoid and remained upright – the realization that corked bottles could be stored on their sides significantly influenced bottle design. As aging benefits in this horizontal position became more widely understood, and as standardization in bottle size and weight grew more important, a shift toward more regular, straight-sided shapes took place. This transition was enabled by the mold-blowing technique, developed in Bristol around the mid-18th century, which allowed for the creation of more uniform bottles.
During the 1750s in England and by the 1780s in the Netherlands, older bottle forms like the shaft-and-globe and onion styles were phased out. They were replaced first by the mallet-shaped bottle, and later by a more cylindrical design. These innovations emerged in tandem across these two regions, which, despite not producing wine themselves, were home to experienced glassmakers and savvy merchants. These stakeholders, well-connected in the glassmaking world, actively collaborated with producers to develop bottles that better preserved wine over time and were suited to long-term storage.
In the early history of glass bottles, England and the Netherlands were the pioneering countries. However, in the second half of the 19th century, as the era became more technically complex, France also emerged as a significant innovator in this field – and it was the needs of its cognac industry that drove this process.
While storing bottles horizontally for aging was not as important for spirits as it was for wine, the broader trend of producer-led bottling gradually caught on in Cognac. It seems that the first brandy house to ship in bottles was Renault, founded in 1835. But the practice really took off in the third quarter of the 19th century, when most Cognac producers began selling their product under their own names rather than in casks to London-based merchants who had previously bottled and labelled their brandies in England. This shift was made possible by the French trademark law of 1857, which allowed producers to register and protect their brands.
Eager to establish distinct identities, Cognac firms embraced the opportunity. They were also anxious to personalize their products further by handling the bottling and branding themselves. The trend gained even greater momentum after the phylloxera crisis, which led to a surge in counterfeit products, making it essential for producers to guarantee the provenance and authenticity of their cognacs. By the 1870s, this practice had become widespread – Martell, for example, was already shipping a quarter of its sales in bottles, while Hennessy had reached the halfway mark.
However, despite the growing demand for bottles in France, their production remained inefficient and struggled to keep pace, hindered by technological imperfections that could not yet meet the scale required by the burgeoning cognac industry. The mouth-blowing technique was slow, costly, imprecise, and physically exhausting for the workers. Various improvements to the production process were continuously attempted by engineers in different countries, but it was Claude Boucher, a Cognacais by adoption, who finally succeeded in eliminating the need for the mouth-blowing method. The bottle-making machine invented by him eventually enabled French brandy producers to meet the growing demand and helped cognac to establish its dominant presence in global markets.
Claude Boucher was born in Blanzy, eastern France, on December 22, 1842, to parents of modest means. He began working at a very young age at the local glassworks; resourceful and diligent, he quickly rose through the ranks and, by the age of 23, was already a foreman. In 1865, Boucher moves to the La Tremblade bottle plant, and in 1868, becomes the head of the Faymoreau glassworks in Vendée. In 1878, he buys the Saint-Martin glassworks in Cognac.
Up until the middle of the 19th century, cognac houses sourced their bottles mainly from Bordeaux and Rochefort. The first glassworks in the municipality of Cognac was opened in 1859 by Oscar Planat, a brandy merchant who would become the town’s mayor. Others would follow, including the one in the Saint-Martin suburb (built in 1864).
These early glass factories were harsh environments, where workers faced intense heat, significant health risks from the physical demands of the job, and long, unrelenting hours.
Child labour was also prevalent in these factories, with young workers subjected to the same conditions as their adult counterparts, often performing exhausting and repetitive tasks for little pay and with minimal regard for their safety. Bottle manufacturing was considered to be one of the most deadly industries – glass workers typically died between the ages of 40 and 45 due of untreated internal burns, lead poisoning, lung diseases, and infections contracted through the use of uncleaned blowpipes. Syphilis was considered an occupational hazard: since blowpipes were shared among several workers, a single infected glassmaker could easily transmit the disease to his teammates and, in turn, to entire families. Workers also suffered from facial deformities due to constant blowing and cataracts caused by the reflection of molten glass.
Working conditions at glass factories were so unbearable that in the 1890s, a wave of strikes swept across the country. Boucher’s factory in Saint-Martin was no exception. In 1891, it was blacklisted by the Congress of the National Federation of Glass Workers held in Lyon, and in 1893, after Claude Boucher attempted to introduce additional internal regulations – including, among other things, a ban on talking during work and on taking toilet breaks during shifts with heavy fines for violators – his employees went on strike, and the management was forced to halt production. Boucher’s conflict with the workers and trade unions continued until 1897; throughout this period, his factory remained idle. While production was at a standstill, Boucher turned to developing methods for the automation of the manufacturing of bottles. He filed several patents in 1894, 1895, and 1896, and finally, in 1898, introduced the first semi-automatic bottle-making machine, which transformed the industry completely.
Prior to that, the traditional tools of the glassmaker were quite basic. The main instrument was the blowpipe, used to gather the molten glass and shape it into a bottle. Molds were employed to form the bottle’s shape, while tools such as scrapers, pliers, scissors, and other smaller implements completed the set. Many early experimenters had sought to make strides toward mechanizing bottle production, but the modifications they proposed were often impractical for large-scale industrial use. In the end, it was Cognac’s Boucher who succeeded in creating the first truly functional bottle-making production system.
The machine invented by Boucher streamlined most of the glassblowing process. While the glass paste still had to be picked by hand, the system required the glassmaker to do little more than operate a pedal or handwheel. It employed a simple mechanical mechanism to gather molten glass, shape it in a mold, and perform the initial blowing. Human workers were still needed for finer tasks, such as finishing and handling the bottles, but this hybrid approach significantly improved efficiency and consistency in bottle production. Each unit could produce between 80 and 100 bottles per hour – significantly more than the half or fewer produced by mouth-blowing. After further improvements, production increased to 140 bottles per hour.
Boucher reopened his glassworks in Cognac with a dramatically reduced workforce – just 80 employees – thanks to the introduction of automated production methods. While his innovation is often framed as a progressive step toward improving working conditions, the reality is more complex. Whether this shift reflected genuine concern for worker welfare, as is often claimed, or a strategic move to sidestep growing unrest and reduce dependency on skilled, organized labour remains open to interpretation. What is clear, however, is that Boucher’s invention revolutionized the entire sector, drastically increasing the speed and efficiency of bottle production. This, in turn, provided the cognac industry with the reliable, large-scale supply of bottles it desperately needed – albeit at the cost of many traditional glassmaking jobs and the erosion of workers’ negotiating power.
For his invention, Claude Boucher received a shower of awards, including a grand prize at the 1900 World’s Fair. He was also presented with the Legion of Honour in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the glassmaking industry. By 1909, 100 million bottles were made in France using the Boucher process and as many abroad. Saint-Gobain decided to install them in their Escaupont and Dorignies glassworks, as well as in their factory in Jerez de la Frontera, and in 1919 became the majority shareholder of Claude Boucher’s company. The factory continued to operate under Boucher’s system until 1940, producing bottles using his semi-automatic machine. In 1960, Saint-Gobain consolidated its glass production facilities by merging the Cognac site with several others to form a new plant in Châteaubernard, near Cognac.This facility, known as Verrerie de l’Ouest, began operations in 1963 and produced up to 2 million bottles per day. Saint-Gobain later rebranded its glass packaging division as Verallia, which exists to this day (having become independent in 2015).
The evolution of the glass bottle tells a story not just of changing technologies, but of how commerce, craftsmanship, and consumer culture shaped one another over centuries. What began as a fragile, costly vessel reserved for the elite gradually became an indispensable tool for preserving, branding, and transporting wine and spirits across the globe. As methods improved – from mouth-blown to mold-formed and ultimately to machine-made –bottles became more than containers: they became symbols of quality, consistency, and provenance.
Claude Boucher’s invention of the first semi-automatic bottle-making machine was a turning point in this transformation. Though often remembered as a visionary industrialist, his story also reveals the tensions at the heart of technological progress. By mechanizing the production process, Boucher helped catapult the cognac industry into the modern age, enabling mass distribution on an unprecedented scale. His legacy, however, is twofold: a triumph of ingenuity, yet also a reminder of the human cost behind every revolution in production.
Alexandr Gorokhovskiy
© 2025
Bibliography and further reading:
Jean-Robert Pitte, La bouteille de vin: histoire d’une révolution (Paris: Tallandier, 2013).
Johann Soetens, In glas verpakt / Packaged in glass: European bottles, their history and production (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2001).
Willy Van den Bossche, Antique Glass Bottles, Their History and Evolution (1500-1850) (Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2001).
Eleonor S. Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560-1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Roger Dumbrell, Understanding Antique Wine Bottles (Antique Collector's Club, 1983).
David Dungworth, ‘Three and a Half Centuries of Bottle Manufacture’, Industrial Archaeology Review, 34:1 (2012), pp. 37-50.
Stephen Skelton, The Knight Who Invented Champagne: How Sir Kenelm Digby Developed Robust Glass Bottles (S.P. Skelton Ltd, 2021).
Jim Chapman, ‘The Cider Industry and the Glass Bottle’, Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology Journal (2012), pp. 36-40.
Patrick de Saint Louvent, La Maison Renault à Cognac depuis 1835 (Editions François Baudez, 2019).
P. Bour, P. Reverchon, C. Moriceau, Claude Boucher: les cent ans d’une révolution. Une histoire des industries verrières á Cognac (Musée de la Ville de Cognac, 1998).
