History · c. 1615–1700
Early glass bottling and sparkling cider in England
Was sparkling cider made in England before sparkling wine?
In short
Deliberately brisk bottled cider is described in England in the seventeenth century, and the technical conditions for it — strong coal-fired glass and cork stoppers — were in place in England earlier than elsewhere. Worlidge and others describe bottling cider so that fermentation finishes in the bottle, which is bottle conditioning in all but name.
What does not follow is that England invented sparkling drinks. Fermentation in a sealed container is not an invention but a consequence, and it will have occurred wherever a fermenting liquid was sealed. The English contribution was a container strong enough to survive it and a written record of doing it on purpose.
The container problem
A liquid that is still fermenting produces carbon dioxide. In a cask, the gas escapes; in a sealed vessel, it dissolves and builds pressure. Until a vessel existed that could hold several atmospheres and be closed reliably, sparkling drink could not be made and kept on purpose — it could only happen and then burst.
England acquired that vessel earlier than most of Europe for a reason unconnected with drink. From the early seventeenth century the use of timber to fire glass furnaces was restricted, to preserve wood for shipbuilding and other uses, and English glasshouses converted to coal. Coal furnaces ran hotter, and the glass they produced was darker, thicker and considerably stronger than the wood-fired glass of the Continent.
Cork, imported and increasingly used with wire or string to secure it, completed the arrangement. A strong bottle and a compressible stopper together make containment possible. Neither was developed for cider, and both were available to anyone bottling anything.
What the seventeenth-century writers describe
Worlidge’s Vinetum Britannicum of 1676 treats bottling as an ordinary part of good practice and describes the results: cider bottled while a little sweetness remains becomes brisk, and the bottles must be handled and stored accordingly. He is describing an effect that is understood, wanted and managed, not an accident being reported for the first time.
The surrounding literature says the same in less detail. Bottled cider is repeatedly distinguished from cask cider as a better and more valuable product, which is consistent with a drink that both kept longer and had a livelier texture. The high prices reported for bottled Herefordshire cider in London belong to this context.
The Royal Society circle of the same decades was also interested in the general question of making drinks brisk in bottle, including by adding sugar. That interest is documented for wine as well as for cider, and the two strands should not be collapsed into one another.
The claim to handle carefully
The popular version — that the English invented sparkling wine, or that cider makers taught Champagne its method — runs well ahead of the evidence. What the record supports is narrower and still interesting: that English glass technology made containment practical several decades before it was practical elsewhere, and that English writers described deliberate secondary fermentation in bottle in the 1660s and 1670s.
It does not support a line of transmission from an English cider cellar to a French wine cellar. Nobody has demonstrated one. The techniques converge because the physics is the same and the containers became available, which is the ordinary way technologies appear in more than one place.
It is also worth noting what English practice of the period lacked. There was no reliable way to measure or control the pressure produced, no disgorging, and no dosage: bottles broke, and cloudy sediment stayed in the bottle. The methodical control of secondary fermentation came later, and came from wine.
What this changed for cider
Bottling turned cider from a farm product into a tradeable one. A sealed bottle can be graded, priced, carried and stored; a cask drawn in the farmyard cannot. The seventeenth-century enthusiasm for Herefordshire cider is inseparable from the fact that it could be sent to London in glass.
The technique then persisted unevenly. Bottled and naturally sparkling cider continued to be made, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries moved the mass market towards cask and later towards forced carbonation, which is cheaper and controllable. Bottle-conditioned cider survived as a minority practice and returned to visibility with the late-twentieth-century revival.
How this developed
Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.
From c. 1615
English glass converts to coal
Restrictions on firing glass furnaces with timber push English glasshouses to coal, producing stronger, darker bottles.
Mid-seventeenth century· probable
Cork and strong glass in routine use
The combination needed to contain a pressurised drink becomes available to English bottlers.
1660s–1670s
Deliberate briskness described
Worlidge and others describe bottling cider with fermentation unfinished, and the lively result.
Later seventeenth century· probable
Bottled cider as a traded product
Bottled cider from the western counties reaches metropolitan buyers at prices unavailable to cask cider.
Popular retelling· contested
‘The English invented sparkling wine’
A claim built on the genuine priority of English glass, extended into a claim about invention and transmission that no evidence supports.
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- Did cider makers invent sparkling wine?
- When was cider first bottled?
- Why were English bottles stronger than French ones?
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Places
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How do you pour bottle conditioned cider — Stand the bottle upright for a day, chill it, and pour in one continuous movement, stopping when the sediment reaches the shoulder. Some traditions deliberately rouse the sediment instead, and both are defensible.
- How is sparkling cider made
- What glass should cider be served in — There is no single traditional cider glass. A tulip or small wine glass concentrates aroma; a straight half-pint suits draught cider; and several regions have their own vessels, from the Asturian *culín* glass to the Frankfurt *Geripptes*.
- How is cider bottled
- What is evelyn’s pomona
- Why was the royal society interested in cider — Cider making was one of the earliest subjects of organised experimental agriculture: it involved measurable variables, an economically important product, and a fermentation nobody understood. The Society collected and published reports on it from the 1660s.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider
John Worlidge · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1676
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1678 edition held by the Internet Archive. John Worlidge, active 1669–1698; the work ran to further editions including 1691, so a citation to it should say which. The full title is broader than the short one CiderHQ uses and matters for what the book can be cited for: it covers other fruit wines and drinks alongside cider, so it is evidence about seventeenth-century English fruit fermentation generally rather than about cider alone.
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.
Where to go next
- The history of cider — The rest of the history, by period and by tradition.
- Cider culture — What survived from this history and is still practised.
- Regions — The places this happened in, and what they make now.