Yes, this is the Bristol Wine Blog, even if some readers might have thought that they had mistakenly found something else on reading the title! But this time I’m concentrating on the bottles themselves rather than the wine inside them.
You’ll know that some wine bottles have flat bottoms whereas others have a deep indentation or ‘punt’ in the bottom (see picture left). Why? Does a punt (or lack of one) tell us anything that might help us decide which wine to buy?
Around 300 years ago, all glass bottles were individually blown. To ensure that the early bottles were roughly round in shape, the glassblower would turn the bottle as it was being formed using a ‘pontil rod’ attached to the bottom. This would be cut off at the end of the process but, if the bottom was flat and a small stub remained, the bottle would rock on its base and be unstable. Hence, the introduction of the punt to conceal this imperfection.
Today, virtually all bottles are machine-made, so does the punt still serve any useful purpose? For sparkling wine bottles, yes. They need to be made from specially strengthened glass to withstand the pressure inside and it has been shown that having a punt adds to this strength. Any other wine could just as easily be stored in a flat-bottomed bottle.
That brings me to the comment that I’ve often heard that the bigger the punt, the better the wine inside the bottle. This one is closely related to the idea that the heavier the bottler, the better the wine. In both cases, the producer may want you to think this, but, as a way of judging quality, bottle weight and size of punt come well down the list. Indeed, many quality-minded producers are also ecologically-minded and are now deliberately bottling their wines in lighter, usually flat-bottomed, bottles.
A move that I think is definitely worth encouraging.
Wine talks and tastings 