In the 2nd and 3rd century A.D., wine transport underwent a revolution. Amphorae, wine containers par excellence for over a millennium, gave way to wooden barrels. An invention of the Celtic world, barrels have been documented since the 1st century B.C., but they were not used by Mediterranean peoples for many years. Even in the late 1st century A.D., Pliny the Elder expressed his mistrust of these containers, responsible, he believed, for episodes of death by poisoning. A century and a half later, instead, in the words of the jurist Ulpianus, barrels were part of the indispensable equipment of a country estate.

In Etruria, Lazio and Campania, the favourite means of transporting wine overland was for years the culleus, an enormous wineskin made of oxen hide, holding over 500 litres, mounted on a wagon. It was only in the 4th century A.D. that representations of wagons carrying barrels became common, also in the frescoes of Roman catacombs, confirming the definitive demise of the wine amphora, superseded by a more economical and functional storage system that was to last to our own day.