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 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 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 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 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.
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 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. 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 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 heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.