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Although the Romans invented glass blowing and, in 1821, an English company patented a machine to mold bottles that were uniform in size and shape, selling wine in bottles was illegal in England until 1860. Wine was sold by the measure and then bottled, with the customer providing the bottles which were often identified with a personal seal. Paper labels identifying the contents developed in the late 1800s. Until the 1970s, wine bottle sizes varied from about 650 to 850 mililiters. A world standard size wine bottle is now 750 mililiters (26.7 oz.).

Bottling equipment can vary from the primitive, using siphon hoses, funnels, hand corking and labeling machines, to the modern, very sophisticated, sterile "hospital conditions" of a totally automated bottling line. Either process must include methods for sterilizing the bottles, standardizing the fill level, inserting the corks, covering them with capsules or foils, attaching the labels and boxing the bottles for storage or shipment.

Before bottling, the winemaker conducts blending trials, combining small samples of cuvées or batches of wine from different grape varieties, or vineyards, or of different vintages, in varying combinations until the wine tastes best. When the final blend is determined, the "recipe" is made and the wine is blended accordingly and bottled.

Wines that are intended for early consumption, where freshness and fruity, floral characteristics are of prime importance, may be kept for extended periods in large refrigerated tanks where these qualities are best preserved. The wine is bottled in batches at various points during the year, as needed to replenish depleted store shelves or restaurant stocks.

Among the most dynamic and civilization-altering changes of the 20th Century are the methods of preserving and packaging foodstuffs. At the turn of the 19th Century, a typical general store's shelves might have a stock of dried or canned goods, bulk grain and flour. Meat and poultry, fish, dairy, produce and baked goods all came from specialty stores or straight from the production source. Food shopping was an errand run several times per week.

A modern market has a wide variety and large inventory of fresh, packaged, prepared and frozen foods and many shoppers go but once a week or even less. Treatments, additives and refrigeration have made it possible to preserve food in an edible state for greater periods of time and therefore, to cultivate and harvest higher volumes of perishable goods.

Some of these methods also can be applied to winemaking. We have already mentioned the role of refrigeration in temperature control during fermentation. There are also additives, besides yeast and fining agents, that can be used to "doctor" wines. The most common are acids such as citric, tartaric or tannic, used to adjust the balance of wine. Oak chips and powdered oak can add flavor and added tannins can improve color and balance. These treatments and additives are very unusual for fine wine grown in the best appellations, but may be common in attempting to coax palatable wine from grapes grown in marginal climates

Until late in the Industrial Revolution, the growth of the wine industry was almost entirely territorial and hardly at all technical. Wine making methods were passed on from mostly European traditions. In 1957, Industrialist-Diplomat James D. Zellerbach opened a new winery in Sonoma, dedicated to and named after his wife Hana and modeled in great detail after the architecture and methods of Clos de Vougeot in Burgogne ("Burgundy"), France. Mixing innovation with tradition, Hanzell was the first winery to use stainless steel tanks (of his own design) for fermentation, to import French oak barrels, and to have a laboratory on the premises for monitoring and analysis, all of which are common elements of modern wineries.

Mechanical advances such as field crushers, bladder and roto presses, stainless steel tanks, micropore filters, refrigeration, vacuum-bottling and other devices and methods have all evolved in the past four decades.