Wine Bottles – What is a punt?
So the new thing in my house is for the family to gather around the television set at 7:30 to watch Jeopardy. It has been a blast!!! Of course, I love the “Food and Wine” and “Pop Culture” type categories and cringe at most of the other ones, but still. The whole family has fun and we learn something new each time we watch. This is what we learned a few days ago….
The hole at the bottle of the wine bottle is called a “punt”. Some of you Southerners may know the hole as a “dimple” but it’s actually a punt. My good friend Kay just told me that the deeper the punt the better the wine!!! Not sure about that one, but at least I now know what a punt on a bottle of wine is for!
Originally, it was done because making the bottom of a hand-blown glass bottle completely flat was near impossible. So, they put the little dimple in the bottom so only the edge needed to be flat. It just kind of stuck. People use it when pouring wine and some wineries like bottles with really big punts.
Can you go through life without knowing this? Of course! But isn’t it more fun to know some bits of useless trivia!
I’m not buying the ‘bigger is better’ thing… – Melissa
had a friend go on a wine tasting and she was loaded with new info. she told me stuff like never buy wine with an animal on the label.. silly huh? but I do wonder why the punt is deeper on better wine. i mean why wouldn’t crappy wine makers just buy better punts 🙂
Ha! Maybe the “bigger punt equals better wine” thing is a wives tale or maybe it’s actually true. I’ll start paying attention and let you know!
I would think the bigger the punt, the less wine in the bottle?! That can’t be a good thing.
So, according to Wikipedia, punt sizes have nothing to do with quality of wine. It is a nostalgic throwback to when wine bottles were blown by hand. They found that if they put the dimple in the bottom, the bottle didn’t have to be as perfect and it was stronger. The bigger the punt, the bigger the bottle has to be to still have 750mL. That leads to enhanced marketing techniques. All very interesting.