Why are drinks bottles made from colored glass?

Answer 1

Glass is very inert and therefore does not have a chemical reaction with the wine - and therefore does not effect the taste of the wine. Also coloured glass is used to protect the wine from sunlight, which will also alter the taste of the wine. Glass also seals in the wine and stops the wines exposure to air (except through the cork if it has one) which will also alter the taste. I imagine it is also a historical thing carried over from a time when modern materials didn't exist - in the same way screw tops and synthetic corks are better but lots of people prefer real corks. Another reason might be the economic consideration - ie. glass is pretty cheap. Plus the experience is probably an important factor as well. Can you imagine taking a nice carton or can of wine to a friend's house to share over a nice dinner? It wouldn't feel the same.

Answer 2

So you know the contents.. Glass bottles have labels because the surface is too smooth to write or otherwise place an inscription the contents on. Other logical reasons would be because labels are far cheaper to replace than making a new bottle with the contents of the bottle; that more information can be put on a label in a variety of colours and fonts, including pictures. Also, bottles are manufactured without concern as to the future contents or user - so many companies may use bottles from the same manufacture and simply create a label to describe it's contents. By far the simplest answer would be that glass bottles have labels to describe its contents eg. water or vodka! so you know the content of the bottle..

Answer 3

There are a couple of reasons.

The first is that it's actually kind of difficult to make truly colorless glass, and it's historically been much easier (and usually cheaper) to take not-quite-colorless glass and make it brown or green than it is to totally remove any hint of color from it.

The second is that tinting glass protects the contents. Laboratory glassware used for certain kinds of analysis ... for example, that used when assaying vitamins ... is often strongly tinted (usually red), because many vitamins break down when exposed to light. Red glass blocks the more energetic rays from the blue end of the spectrum, and helps keep the vitamins from degrading.

Nowadays we have better techniques, so colorless glass is pretty cheap. Using colorless glass allows the color of the contents to be seen, which is actually a third reason that colored glass may have been used in the past: if your product is kind of a nasty color, or cloudy, or otherwise unappealing, it might be better from a marketing standpoint to put it in a pretty green bottle that largely masked what the drink itself looked like (nowadays manufacturers just use better filtration and add colorants to the product itself when necessary, but some drinks ... beer, for example ... often still do come in colored bottles for traditional reasons).