Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff. Floren
Speaker 1: Vogel Bomb here. If you've ever picked up a wine bottle,
Speaker 1: you may have noticed a pretty distinctive feature, a big
Speaker 1: dent in the bottom. The technical term for the dent
Speaker 1: is punt, and given that winemaking and bottling traditions go
Speaker 1: back centuries or even millennia, surely this dent has been
Speaker 1: there since time immemorial to serve some specific and scientific
Speaker 1: purpose or not. There's no real consensus on why the
Speaker 1: punt is there, but it does have a number of
Speaker 1: practical uses, so no matter why glassblowers started putting punts
Speaker 1: and bottles, they've stuck around. The first and maybe most
Speaker 1: plausible reason for putting an indentation in the base of
Speaker 1: a wine bottle is that it makes the bottle less tippy.
Speaker 1: A wine bottles are often tall and narrow, and when
Speaker 1: they were originally hand blown, the loss blowing process created
Speaker 1: a seam at the bottom. Adding the punt pushed the
Speaker 1: seam up into the bottle, and the extra weight helped
Speaker 1: keep the bottom where it belongs on the table. It
Speaker 1: seems less likely that the punt is there to catch
Speaker 1: wine sediment or dregs in the bottom of the bottle.
Speaker 1: I mean it kind of does, but when you're pouring wine,
Speaker 1: the sediment is actually caught by the shoulders of the bottle,
Speaker 1: that is, where the bottle curves into the neck, and
Speaker 1: many bottles of wine are stored on their sides anyway,
Speaker 1: so the punt wouldn't matter for that. Furthermore, there's the
Speaker 1: fact that many wines don't really contain sediments, but their
Speaker 1: bottles still have punts, and that leads us to a
Speaker 1: couple of sneakier reasons for that indentation. For a long time,
Speaker 1: the finest wines had punts and cheaper wines did not.
Speaker 1: But the makers of cheaper wines figured out that people
Speaker 1: might pay more for wine in bottles with punts because
Speaker 1: they thought it meant the wine was of a higher quality,
Speaker 1: So today punts exist across many wine prices and qualities.
Speaker 1: Then there's the fact that a bottle with a punt
Speaker 1: may look bigger than a bottle without. You might feel
Speaker 1: like you're getting more bang for your buck, but part
Speaker 1: of that space is just extra glass and air. Most
Speaker 1: bottles hold the standard seven hundred and fifty milliters of wine,
Speaker 1: no matter what the shape. But okay, whyever the punt
Speaker 1: was put there? It turns out that it is pretty useful.
Speaker 1: You can grip the bottom of the bottle by putting
Speaker 1: your thumb in the punt as you pour a glass.
Speaker 1: This looks elegant assuming you don't drop the bottle, which
Speaker 1: I totally have, and helps avoid transferring the heat from
Speaker 1: your hand to the wine. And speaking of temperature, the
Speaker 1: punt provides more surface area, which helps some varieties chill faster. Also,
Speaker 1: when you're storing bottles on their sides, you can slide
Speaker 1: the neck of one bottle into the punt of another
Speaker 1: in order to fit more bottles in a tight spaces.
Speaker 1: Episode is based on the article why does your one
Speaker 1: bottle have a dent in the bottom on houstuffworks dot
Speaker 1: com written by Kristen Hall Geisler. The brain stuff is
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio in partnership with houstuffworks dot com, and
Speaker 1: it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.