The romantic notion of finding a message in a bottle is ever green. Bottle messages were featured in a 1999 film starring Kevin Costner, in a popular StarTrek: Voyager episode and in various novels, but most of us identify the phrase with the 1979 pop-hit by the Police. While the world’s creative talent focuses on the communication inside the bottle, no one seems to have considered the message emanating from the bottle itself. With a voluptuous mouth, slim neck, soft shoulders and curvaceous body, the wine bottle’s come hither communiqué has been sending romantic messages to wine lovers for centuries.

Bottles come in all shapes, sizes and colours, but some designs are associated with a specific grape variety, wine style or region. Bordeaux wines – no matter what their style – are always packaged in bottles with straight sides and distinctive tall shoulders. Red Bordeaux is found in dark green glass, white Bordeaux in lighter green glass and sweet Bordeaux, such as Sauternes or Barsac, are in clear glass bottles. Both Alsace and the Mosel Valley use green or blue-green glass for their bottles, whereas the nearby Rhine region uses brown glass.

Colours affect the light filtration into the bottle, with the darker colours being considered more protective of the contents inside. Thus vin de guard or ‘wines for keeping’ are bottled in darker coloured bottles. Wines intended to be savoured while young (one to two years old), such as Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio, are often in clear or pale green bottles to portray a vibrant, youthful image. Rosé is almost always bottled in clear glass to show off its Pretty in Pink colour. Clear glass is a helpful messenger because once rosé is tinged orange it is time to drink-up as the wine is beginning its journey toward middle-aged spread. Many powerful supermarket chains in the United Kingdom not long ago demanded that wine producers use recycled glass for everyday drinking wines. The producers concurred, but there was a problem as there is little clear recycled bottle glass on the market. Producers who poured their pretty pink rosé in pale green bottles, saw sales crash immediately: pink and green do not a pretty colour make.

In Burgundy, there are not such discernable differences in glass colour, though white Burgundy bottles are often in a light gold autumnal-leaf hue whereas red Burgundy is always sheltered in dark bottles. Shape is another matter. Wine aficionados playing the “guess the origin” game have been known to take a sneaky grope even while pouring from bottles encased in socks or bags to mask identity. Burgundy’s bottle shoulders reflect the laid-back attitude of the region’s producers: gently sloping and relaxed, but their bodies distinctly reflect my family gene-pool: broad-in-the-beam or bottom heavy. These slope-shouldered, plush-bottomed beauties are challenging to keep in orderly submission on the cellar shelves. Rhone bottles have a similar shape to Burgundy, but are a tad slimmer with many sporting an embossed coat of arms on the neck. Tall, slender bottles known as flutes are typical of Germany and Alsace, though the short, squat bocksbeutal is de riguer from Germany’s Franken region. Provence’s unique bowling pin shaped bottle is known as a skittle. Most fortified wines, such as Port, Madeira and sweet Sherry are intended for lengthy aging, so the bottles are usually sturdy and with long necks to accommodate an extended cork. Port bottles often flare at the neck, purportedly to help capture sediment when decanting the wine, which is also one of the explanations for Bordeaux’s firm shoulders. Classic European bottle shapes have been widely adopted by winemakers around the world, all hoping to emanate an irresistibly romantic message, though a few of the whacky shapes infiltrating our shelves lately are seeming more like Sting’s plaintive SOS.

Madeira is often touted as America’s Fortified Wine, but ask an American to describe Madeira and the most likely response is a blank stare. This toffee-flavored wine has fallen out of fashion in recent decades, but it was once the toast of the town. America’s founding fathers clinked glasses of Madeira while signing their Declaration of Independence, President George Washington requested Madeira for his inauguration ceremony and devotee Betsy Ross purportedly nipped the amber liquid while sewing the stars and stripes.

Madeira is a fortified wine, which means its natural alcohol levels are kicked up by adding spirits, sort of like spiking tomato juice with vodka on a Sunday morning. Before the advent of modern science, wine was notoriously unstable and difficult to ship so producers added brandy to the wine for protection. While alcohol has been known to make humans unsteady on their feet, it does give wine a decided stability.

Though Madeira is majestically linked to America’s history, it is a Portuguese wine, produced on an unlikely hunk of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Handily positioned in the midst of Atlantic shipping lanes, this isolated Portuguese island-province became a fashionable stopover for European ships stockpiling fresh food, wine and water on the way to colonies as far flung as the South America, India, West Africa and even Macau.

Anyone worth his or her frequent flyer miles will attest that travel is hard on the body and as stable as the fortified wine was upon boarding ship, it was soon discovered that the equatorial heat, moist humidity and rollicking ocean transformed the wine irrevocably. Upon arrival, the wines were tinged deep amber to mahogany and sported richly concentrated nutty, caramel flavors.

This delicious conversion inspired the Madeirense to ship wine barrels ‘round the world and back as ballast before releasing to market. Later, the vintners reasoned they could recreate the same effect under controlled conditions by maturating their wine in the warm lofts of humidified warehouses called lodges. Madeira’s aged caramelized character was such a hit with consumers that it didn’t take long for unscrupulous winemakers to hustle the process by heating the wine in vats. Large wine hot-tubs bubbled up a sickly sweet concoction that gutted Madeira’s reputation for high quality wine.

Top-quality Madeira is always matured naturally and comes in four main styles, each from a different grape variety: Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey. Sercial is the lightest and driest wine, with each variety increasingly rich and complex until Malmsey, which is so densely concentrated and sweet it is suitable only for dessert. If mastering four new grape varieties is daunting, here’s my memorization trick, from lightest to sweetest: “Some Very Bad Men are sweet.”

While Madeira always has a kiss of sweetness, the island’s high altitude vineyards ensure the wines have a tangy bite. Madeira is amongst the longest living wines and unopened will keep indefinitely. Once the cork has been pulled, the wine will keep a year or so before losing its freshness. Sercial and Verdelho, the two lightest styles, make dramatic aperitifs and are delicious with soups or served immediately after the main course, but “Bad Men” can be quite rich and are best reserved for after dinner pleasure.

As any Sex & The City fan will tell you, intensity is a relationship-killer. Luckily, when it comes to wine, intensity is a relationship-winner. Intensity is a term loosely used to describe the strength and power of wine’s aroma. A wine can be described as low-, medium- or high-intensity based on the potency of its aromas, whether they’re weak or pronounced. Ideally, you want to be able to smell the wine aromas while talking to your honey – but without getting your nose wet!

Certain varieties naturally will have more intensity than others, such as the highly aromatic white wine varieties, Sauvignon Blanc and Gewurztraminer. Because most new world producers tend to maximize fruit ripeness and ferment their grapes in cool temperature-controlled tanks and cellars, their wines usually have intoxicating aromatic intensity. Traditional European producers leave much to nature – at times sacrificing fruit intensity for the development of an earthier complexity. A wine’s aromatic potency diminishes with time, so younger wines will aromatically leap from the glass by comparison to delicate vintage wines.

An easy way to evaluate a wine’s intensity is to position the bowl of the glass at your naval. Slowly bring the glass toward your nose. When you can smell the wine, pause to consider where the glass is in relation to your nose. If the glass is positioned below your chin, then the wine has high intensity. If the glass is between your chin and nose, then the wine has medium intensity. If you have a wet-puppy nose, then the wine has low intensity, definitely.

Aside from aesthetic pleasure, aromatic intensity has a practical value: relationship two-timing. While wooing a potential sweetheart across the dining table, one should be able to hold the glass under one’s nose, utter a few admiring comments across the table all the while secretly enjoying the wine’s heady aroma. Unlike some quality characteristics in wine, such as acidity or sweetness, which are measureable, intensity is a subjective judgment. As with too much perfume, more is not necessarily better, yet a wine should have sufficient aromatic heft to allow you to enjoy the wine aromas wafting from the glass without having to awkwardly shove your nose into the glass to get a whiff. Flirting while your nose is in the glass is a definite relationship-killer.

If the use of the words high-, medium- or low-intensity are too mundane for your colourful wine friends, then describe high-intensity wines as powerful, robust or intensely perfumed. Medium-intensity wines can be described as delicately perfumed or gently aromatic and low-intensity wines as flat, weak, neutral, tenuous or anemic. Whether you prefer high-intensity or medium-intensity wines is a matter of style preferences – just as in relationships – but never settle for a low intensity relationship, whether in the glass or otherwise.