[Illustration: Figure 19. Apothecary’s vials, 18th or early 19th century. The neck and base fragments are not all from the same bottles.] [Illustration: Base fragments.] WINE AND SPIRITS BOTTLES [Illustration: uncaptioned] Perhaps the oldest use for glass bottles has been the storage and transport of alcohol. Some of the oldest bottles from the Middleton Place privy are wine and spirits bottles. Bottles made in the same dark green glass as the three pictured below left were used by the earliest colonists for various wines and spirits, and, although the bottle shapes have varied over the centuries, the tradition continues in the green wine bottles of the present day. With the improvement of glassmaking techniques in the nineteenth century, alcohol bottles became more diverse and specialized. Although a simple cylindrical bottle (Fig. 20B) remained a standard for various types of spirits, flasks, like those later used by the South Carolina Dispensary (Fig. 22B and C), became more and more common for whiskey. Beer bottles developed a distinctive shape (Fig. 21), and different shapes evolved for different types of wines. Figure 20A is a Bordeaux wine bottle, used since the early nineteenth century for the sauternes and clarets of the French Bordeaux district. The amber miniature shown in Figure 20D is a two-ounce sample bottle of the shape normally used for German Rhine wines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most types of alcohol bottles could be purchased in miniature sizes for use in advertising and promotion. [Illustration: Figure 20. Wine and spirits bottles. A. Turn-molded, probably c. 1870s. B. Three-piece mold, c. 1850-1880. C. Three-piece mold, sand pontil, c. 1820-1880. D. Rhine wine sample bottle, c. 1870s-1920s.] BEER BOTTLES The three late nineteenth century bottles shown below represent one of the oldest pastimes in America. Until the late nineteenth century, however, most American beers were locally produced ales, stouts, and porters that were not bottled but sold in kegs to taverns. Modern lager beer was first introduced by German immigrants in the 1840s, but it was not until the 1870s that the expanding railway system, together with the food preservation techniques developed by Louis Pasteur in 1870, made it feasible to brew and bottle lager beer for a nationwide market. [Illustration: Figure 21. Beer bottles. A. Pint champagne beer, Lightning stopper, c. 1892-1895. Embossed in plate mold THE PALMETTO BREWING CO. CHARLESTON S. C.; on back THIS BOTTLE NOT TO BE SOLD. B and C. Export beer bottles, a type used after the 1870s. The tooled crown finish dates bottle B between about 1892 and 1925.]