Wine bottle

A bottle showing the transparent green of many wine bottles

Side-by-side comparison of champagne bottles (left to right), on the ladder: magnum, full, half and quarter; on the floor: Balthazar, Salmanazar, Methuselah and Jeroboam

A wine bottle is a bottle used for holding wine, generally made of glass. Some wines are fermented in the bottle, others are bottled only after fermentation.

Recently, the bottle has become a standard unit of volume to describe sales in the wine industry, measuring 750 ml. However, bottles are produced in a variety of volumes and shapes.

Wine bottles are usually sealed with cork, but screw-top caps are becoming popular, and there are several other methods used to seal a bottle.

Sizes

The chart below expresses the sizes of various wine bottles in multiples relating to a standard bottle of wine, which is 0.75 liters (0.20 U.S. gal; 0.16 imp gal). Many common sizes are named for Biblical kings and other historical figures.

Because of the size of the bottles, most champagne houses are unable to carry out secondary fermentation in bottles larger than magnum size. The wine is then decanted into the larger bottles. This inevitably causes loss of pressure and more oxidation, hence the quality of larger bottles are relatively inferior.

Volume (litres)	Ratio	Name	Notes	Champagne	Bordeaux	Burgundy
0.1875	0.25	Piccolo	"Small" in Italian. Also known as a quarter bottle, pony, snipe or split.	Yes
0.25	0.33	Chopine	Traditional French unit of volume		Yes
0.375	0.5	Demi	"Half" in French. Also known as a half bottle.	Yes	Yes	Yes
0.378	0.505	Tenth	One tenth of a U.S. gallon*
0.5	0.67	Jennie	Also known as a 50 cl bottle. Used for Tokaj, Sauternes, Jerez, as well as several other types of sweet wines.
0.620	0.83	Clavelin	Primarily used for vin jaune.
0.750	1	Standard		Yes	Yes	Yes
0.757	1.01	Fifth	One-fifth of a U.S. gallon*
1.0	1.33	Litre	Used for cheaper-priced wines.
1.5	2	Magnum		Yes	Yes	Yes
2.25	3	Marie Jeanne	Also known as a Tregnum or Tappit Hen in the port wine trade.		Yes
3.0	4	Jeroboam (a.k.a. Double Magnum)	Biblical, First king of Northern Kingdom. "Jeroboam" has different meanings (that is, indicates different sizes) for different regions in France.	Yes		Yes
4.5	6				Yes
4.5	6	Rehoboam	Biblical, First king of separate Judea	Yes		Yes
6.0	8	Imperial			Yes
6.0	8	Methuselah	Biblical, Oldest Man	Yes		Yes
9.0	12	Mordechai	Biblical, Cousin of Esther Queen of Persia	Yes		Yes
9.0	12	Salmanazar	Biblical, Assyrian King	Yes	Yes	Yes
12.0	16	Balthazar	Early Christian folklore, one of the Wise Men	Yes	Yes	Yes
15.0	20	Nebuchadnezzar	Biblical, King of Babylon	Yes	Yes	Yes
18.0	24	Melchior	Early Christian folklore, one of the Wise Men	Yes	Yes	Yes
20.0	26.66	Solomon	Biblical, King of Israel, Son of David	Yes
25.0	33.33	Sovereign		Yes
27.0	36	Primat or Goliath		Yes
30.0	40	Melchizedek	Biblical, King of Salem	Yes

* For many years, the U.S. standard (non-metric) wine and liquor bottle was the "fifth", meaning one-fifth of a U.S. gallon, or 25.6 U.S. fluid ounces (757 ml; 26.6 imp fl oz). Some beverages also came in tenth-gallon, half-gallon and one-gallon sizes. In 1979, the U.S. adopted the metric system for wine bottles, with the basic bottle becoming 750 ml, as in Europe.

Shapes

Bocksbeutel shaped Wine Bottle

Burgundy bottles

Wine producers in Portugal, Italy, Spain, France and Germany follow the tradition of their local areas in choosing the shape of bottle most appropriate for their wine.

• Port, sherry, and Bordeaux varieties: straight-sided and high-shouldered with a pronounced punt. Port and sherry bottles may have a bulbous neck to collect any residue.
• Burgundies and Rhône varieties: tall bottles with sloping shoulders and a smaller punt.
• Schlegel variety, predominantly used in German wine growing regions: similar to Burgundy bottles, but more slender and elongated.
• Rhine (also known as hock or hoch), Mosel, and Alsace varieties: narrow and tall with little or no punt.
• Champagne and other sparkling wines: thick-walled and wide with a pronounced punt and sloping shoulders.
• German wines from Franconia: the Bocksbeutel bottle.
• The Chianti and some other Italian wines: the fiasco, a round-bottomed flask encased in a straw basket. This is more often used for everyday table wines; many of the higher-grade Chianti producers have switched to Bordeaux-type bottles.

Many North and South American, South African, and Australasian wine producers select the bottle shape with which they wish to associate their wines. For instance, a producer who believes his wine is similar to Burgundy may choose to bottle his wine in Burgundy-style bottles.

Other producers (both in and out of Europe) have chosen idiosyncratic bottle styles for marketing purposes. Pere-Anselme markets its Châteauneuf-du-Pape in bottles that appear half-melted. The Moselland company of Germany has a riesling with a bottle in the shape of a house cat.

The home wine maker may use any bottle, as the shape of the bottle does not affect the taste of the finished product. The sole exception is in producing sparkling wine, where thicker-walled bottles should be used to handle the excess pressure.

Most wine bottles standards have a bore (inner neck) diameter of 18.5 at the mouth of the bottle and increase to 21 mm before expanding into the full bottle.

Colours

The traditional colours used for wine bottles are:

• Bordeaux: dark green for reds, light green for dry whites, clear for sweet whites.
• Burgundy and the Rhone: dark green.
• Mosel and Alsace: dark to medium green, although some producers have traditionally used amber.
• Rhine: amber, although some producers have traditionally used green.
• Champagne: Usually dark to medium green. Rosé champagnes are usually a colorless or green.

Clear colourless bottles have recently become popular with white wine producers in many countries, including Greece, Canada and New Zealand. Dark-coloured bottles are most commonly used for red wines, but many white wines also still come in dark green bottles. The main reason for using coloured or tinted glass is that natural sunlight can break down desirable antioxidants such as vitamin c and tannins in a wine over time, which impacts storability and can cause a wine to prematurely oxidise. Dark glass can prevent oxidation and increase storage life. It is therefore mostly ready-to-drink white wines with a short anticipated storage lifespan which are bottled in clear colourless bottles.

Capsules

Most wine bottles are sealed with a cork, although screwcaps are increasingly found. Commercial corked wine bottles typically have a protective sleeve called a capsule (commonly referred to as a "foil") covering the top of the bottle. The purpose of which is to protect the cork from being gnawed away by rodents or infested with the cork weevil., and to serve as collar to catch small drips when pouring. The capsule also serves as a decorative element of the bottle's label. Capsules were historically made of lead; However, because of research showing that trace amounts of toxic lead could remain on the lip of the bottle and mix with the poured wine, lead capsules (lead foil bottleneck wrappings) were slowly phased out, and by the 1990s, most capsules were made of tin, heat-shrink plastic (polyethylene or PVC), or aluminium or polylaminate aluminium. Sealing wax is sometimes used, or the capsule can be omitted entirely. In the US, the FDA officially banned lead foil capsules on domestic and imported wine bottles as of 1996.

Punts

An empty wine bottle with a punt at its base.

A punt, also known as a kick-up, refers to the dimple at the bottom of a wine bottle. There is no consensus explanation for its purpose. The more commonly cited explanations include:

• It is a historical remnant from the era when wine bottles were free blown using a blowpipe and pontil. This technique leaves a punt mark on the base of the bottle; by indenting the point where the pontil is attached, this scar would not scratch the table or make the bottle unstable.
• It had the function of making the bottle less likely to topple over—a bottle designed with a flat bottom only needs a small imperfection to make it unstable—the dimple historically allowed for a larger margin of error.
• It consolidates sediment deposits in a thick ring at the bottom of the bottle, preventing much/most of it from being poured into the glass;
• It increases the strength of the bottle, allowing it to hold the high pressure of sparkling wine/champagne.
• It provides a grip for riddling a bottle of sparkling wine manually in the traditional champagne production process.
• It consumes some volume of the bottle, allowing the bottle to be larger for the same amount of wine, which may impress the purchaser.
• Taverns had a steel pin set vertically in the bar. The empty bottle would be thrust bottom-end down onto this pin, puncturing a hole in the top of the punt, guaranteeing the bottle could not be refilled [folklore].
• It prevents the bottle from resonating as easily, decreasing the likelihood of shattering during transportation.
• It allows bottles to be more easily stacked end to end.
• Bottles could be stacked in cargo holds on ships without rolling around and breaking.
• Punts are also used to help pour the wine, providing a grip for the thumb on the bottom bottle for easy pouring.
• It makes the bottle easier to clean prior to filling with wine. When a stream of water is injected into the bottle and impacts the punt, it is distributed throughout the bottom of the bottle and removes residues.

Environmental impact

Glass retains its colour on recycling, and the United Kingdom has a large surplus of green glass because it imports a large quantity of wine but produces very little. 1.4 million tonnes are sent to landfill annually.

Glass is a relatively heavy packing material and wine bottles use quite thick glass, so the tare weight of a full wine bottle is a relatively high proportion of its gross weight. The average weight of an empty 75 cl wine bottle is 500 g (and can range from 300 to 900 g), which makes the glass 40% of the total weight of the full bottle. This has led to suggestions that wine should be exported in bulk from producer regions and bottled close to the market. This would reduce the cost of transportation and its carbon footprint, and provide a local market for recycled green glass. Less radically, box wine is sold in large-size light cardboard and foil containers, though its use has been restricted to cheaper products in the past and as such retains a stigma. Some wine producers are exploring more alternative packagings such as plastic bottles and tetra packs.

See also

• Beer bottle
• Glass bottle
• Tunc