Does the depth of the dimple on the bottom of a wine bottle reflect the quality of the wine?!
Answers: is this a urban legend (hock has no dimple need i say more)
The chap on the website below conducted his own survey (it's worth reading,quite amusing!), and proved that bottles less than ￡5 have shallow dimples and bottles above ￡5 have deep dimples. (urban legend proved to be 99.999% certain!). By the way, the real name for the 'dimple' is a punt.
i actually believe this, well it always seems that has been the case so far..
is this why a Lambrini bottle has a flat bottom ?
Dimple?
I thought it's more related to the type of wine - sweeter or dessert wines have the deeper dimple. While dry wines have a flatter bottom.
nope. on the label there's a number with a % sign next to it. the higher the better
The dimple was designed so you can pour the wine without making contact with the main body of the bottle.
It also looks rather cool when you pour by using the dimple.
no it's a myth. Quality of a wine resides in it's taste and your particular likes and dislikes. Plain and simple. Only judge by your own taste......you have to drink it.
No. The simple proof is that if there were a strong correlation, it would take no time at all for wineries to begin to bottle ALL their wines in bottles with a punt, good or bad, and the correlation would quickly be undermined.
The long answer is that the punt helped to stabilize the bottle in the days before mass production. It is very hard to hand-blow a bottle with a completely flat bottom. If you made a depression on the bottom, however, the base will be more stable.
Also, champagne makers found that they were losing many bottles when the bottom of the bottle would blow out from the pressure. They found an arched bottle had a stronger shape, borrowing from the strength of an architectural arch.
Now, punts remain mostly for aesthetics and tradition. The "cheapness" of a flat bottom bottle is merely a sense of perception.
Yes, the deeper the dimple the better.
generally yes but there are exceptions.
All nonsense.....
As far as the bottle goes ONLY two issues are of any significance.
1.The colour of the glass (in case of a red wine).
2.The quality of the seal (the cork).
That's it.
Of course for Champagne you would want a stronger type of glass due to the higher pressure.
The depth of the dimple -- known as the 'punt' reflects the cost of the glass bottle. More glass is needed to make a bottle with a punt, deeper the punt, the more the glass. So the bottle is more expensive. It is also heavier, so costs more to transport.
If you are marketing a wine on cost -- i.e you want to sell it cheaply you must save money all down the line and get the cheapest bottle you can, and the bottle alone can cost about half what the actual wine costs to make.
As the retail price of the wine increases, the cost of the bottle takes a smaller proportion of the costs of production and the quality/cost of the bottle can be increased.
A punt also makes the bottle taller, it is more impressive on a shelf and is a marketing statement. If a consumer is goingto pay a lot for a bottle of wine, they want it to appear to be expensive, and a heavy bottle adds to the effect.
So - although there is no reason other than cost for a dirt cheap wine to go into a deeply punted bottle, generally the more expensive the wine, the deeper the punt, on conversely the cheaper the wine, the smaller the punt.
And generally the better wines are more expensive. So there is some truth in the legend -- basically the legend comes observation.
There is absolutely no basis in fact to support this. The dimple/ punt is used for storage, allowing sediment to "drop" through ageing, more easy to pour.
Other things that it has been attributed to are the stability of the bottle when placing it on a surface, and being able to cope with the pressure of Champagne.
Hope this helps