Why Do Wine Bottles Have Dents in the Bottom?

Short answer: No one is sure. But it may have once been practical during production, and the dents (a.k.a. punts) in wine bottles are certainly useful now. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/food-facts/wine-bottle-dent-bottom.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff. Floren
Vogel Bomb here. If you've ever picked up a wine bottle,
you may have noticed a pretty distinctive feature, a big
dent in the bottom. The technical term for the dent
is punt, and given that winemaking and bottling traditions go

(00:24):
back centuries or even millennia, surely this dent has been
there since time immemorial to serve some specific and scientific
purpose or not. There's no real consensus on why the
punt is there, but it does have a number of
practical uses, so no matter why glassblowers started putting punts

(00:44):
and bottles, they've stuck around. The first and maybe most
plausible reason for putting an indentation in the base of
a wine bottle is that it makes the bottle less tippy.
A wine bottles are often tall and narrow, and when
they were originally hand blown, the loss blowing process created
a seam at the bottom. Adding the punt pushed the

(01:04):
seam up into the bottle, and the extra weight helped
keep the bottom where it belongs on the table. It
seems less likely that the punt is there to catch
wine sediment or dregs in the bottom of the bottle.
I mean it kind of does, but when you're pouring wine,
the sediment is actually caught by the shoulders of the bottle,
that is, where the bottle curves into the neck, and

(01:26):
many bottles of wine are stored on their sides anyway,
so the punt wouldn't matter for that. Furthermore, there's the
fact that many wines don't really contain sediments, but their
bottles still have punts, and that leads us to a
couple of sneakier reasons for that indentation. For a long time,
the finest wines had punts and cheaper wines did not.

(01:48):
But the makers of cheaper wines figured out that people
might pay more for wine in bottles with punts because
they thought it meant the wine was of a higher quality,
So today punts exist across many wine prices and qualities.
Then there's the fact that a bottle with a punt
may look bigger than a bottle without. You might feel
like you're getting more bang for your buck, but part

(02:10):
of that space is just extra glass and air. Most
bottles hold the standard seven hundred and fifty milliters of wine,
no matter what the shape. But okay, whyever the punt
was put there? It turns out that it is pretty useful.
You can grip the bottom of the bottle by putting
your thumb in the punt as you pour a glass.

(02:30):
This looks elegant assuming you don't drop the bottle, which
I totally have, and helps avoid transferring the heat from
your hand to the wine. And speaking of temperature, the
punt provides more surface area, which helps some varieties chill faster. Also,
when you're storing bottles on their sides, you can slide
the neck of one bottle into the punt of another

(02:52):
in order to fit more bottles in a tight spaces.
Episode is based on the article why does your one
bottle have a dent in the bottom on houstuffworks dot
com written by Kristen Hall Geisler. The brain stuff is
production of iHeartRadio in partnership with houstuffworks dot com, and
it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my

(03:13):
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