AFTER FERMENTATION WAS OVER (OR SOMETIMES BEFORE IT WAS FINISHED), WINE AS STORED IN TWO PRIMARY TYPES OF CONTAINERS - EARTHENWARE VESSES OR ANIMAL SKINS.  THE CHOICE OF CONTAINER DEPENDED ON WHAT WAS AVAILABLE, AND WHETHER OR NOT THE WINE WAS TO BE TRANSPORTED.

Earthenware Vessels

Common people rarely enjoyed aged wine.  They most often consumed wine within the year of vintage.  Earthenware jars were coated with pitch and filled with "must", placed in a wine cellar and left uncovered for a year, if not drunk directly from the jar earlier.  Better wine was allowed to finish anaerobic fermentation, filled in jars fitted with stone stoppers and sealed with pitch.  Some very unusual methods were employed in the aging process, including leaving it in the sun, or submerging it under water.

Animal Skins

New wine refers to wine that has not completely fermented.  Because of the pressure of carbon dioxide gas being generated by the continuing fermentation, old wineskins were unable to sustain the pressure and break.  New wineskins were therefore chosen for new wine, because they had the durability to withstand the gas pressure and heat of fermentation!

Wineskins had the advantage of being less fragile that jugs or jars when wine was transported on journeys, but clearly had the disadvantage of disintegrating over time and thus unreliable for retaining all of its precious contents.

Wineskins had the drawback of deterioration, so also even new skins could burst if the wine (or perhaps more properly, "must" at this stage), had not completed fermentation, and skin was so tightly sealed that the carbon dioxide had no way to escape.   Many a winemaker has had such an experience with bottles!  On the other hand, goat skins were sufficiently porous to allow water to evaporate, thus concentrating the wine.

Jars were tightly sealed with caps covered with pitch. The very close sealing needed to preserve sparkling wines, however, was unknown to the ancients, and in consequence (and for other reasons) such wines were not used. Hence, in Psalm 75:8, "The wine foameth," the allusion must be to very new wine whose fermentation had not yet subsided, if indeed, the translation is not wrong (the Revised Version margin "The wine is red"). The superiority of old wine to new was widely acknowledged, but in the wines of Palestine acetous fermentation, changing the wine into vinegar, was likely to occur at any time. Three years was about the longest time for which such wines could be kept, and "old wine" meant only wines that had been, stored for a year or more.