At
the end of its long cask maturation, the wine is bottled into a novel container,
the Clavelin, whose 62 centilitre capacity (the only
special dispensation allowed under European regulations in this field) and
shape are now laid down by law. It is, in fact, the only bottle to be permitted
for the sale of yellow wine.The fact that the 62 centilitres in the ‘clavelin’ are virtually all that is left of a litre of wine which began maturing six years earlier, as the oral tradition tells us, is not sufficient to explain the origins of this type of bottle.
The design of the ‘clavelin’ is in fact an adaptation of what is known as the "English" bottle, and in the 19th century it was under the name "65 cl English Clavelin" that the wine-growers ordered bottles from the vieille-Loye glassworks, in the Jura, which designed and produced them on a regular basis until 1885. Production declined from that time onwards, and the factory eventually closed in 1931.
It appears reasonably certain that the word "Clavelin", which is used today as a common name for the Yellow Wine bottle, came from a surname which was common in the Château-Chalon region, but the date and precise circumstances in which the proper name became the common name are still subject to debate.
