Бутылки для вина: формы, материалы и традиции

Bottle used for holding wine

A wine bottle is a bottle, generally a glass bottle, that is used for holding wine. Some wines are fermented in the bottle while others are bottled only after fermentation. Recently the bottle has become a standard unit of volume to describe sales in the wine industry, measuring Wine bottles are produced, however, in a variety of volumes and shapes. Wine bottles are traditionally sealed with a cork, but screw top caps are becoming popular, and there are several other methods used to seal a bottle.

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 Bernkastel Kues in Germany has a Riesling with a bottle in the shape of a stylized cat. The British company Garçon Wines makes a flat wine bottle from recycled PET which is flat enough to fit through a letterbox and hence can be delivered by post. 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 mm at the mouth of the bottle and increase to 21 mm before expanding into the full bottle.

Commercial corked wine bottles typically have a protective sleeve called a foil (commonly referred to as a "capsule") 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 foil also serves as a decorative element of the bottle's label. Foils were historically made of lead, but research showed that trace amounts of toxic lead could remain on the lip of the bottle and mix with the poured wine, so lead foil wrapping was slowly phased out, and by the 1990s, most foils were made of tin, heat shrink plastic (polyethylene, PVC), aluminium or polylaminate aluminium. Sealing wax is sometimes used, or the foil can be omitted entirely. In the US, the FDA officially banned lead foils on domestic and imported wine bottles as of 1996. Some bottles of wine have a paper strip beneath the foil, as a seal of authenticity, which must be broken before the bottle can be uncorked. Bottles of high end Rioja wine may have a covering of gold wire netting, Spaniard Camilo Hurtado de Amézaga, Marqués de Riscal founded a winery in Rioja, in 1858, naming it after his own noble title, which had been created in 1708 by Philip V. He produced award winning wines which became the preferred wines of King Alfonso XII. Camilo Hurtado de Amézaga invented a wire netting that covered his bottle, thereby preventing counterfeiters from substituting the wine, since it was impossible to remove the netting without breaking it. Modern day bottles of Rioja carry a much finer wire netting as a decoration.

A punt, also known as a kick up, is the dimple at the bottom of a wine bottle. There is no consensus explanation for its purpose. The more commonly cited explanations include:
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 appear larger for the same amount of wine, which may impress the purchaser. In folklore, 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. 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. 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 750 mL 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, boxed wine is sold in large, light weight, foil lined cardboard containers, though its use has been restricted to cheaper products in the past and as such retains a stigma. Following declining sales of wine boxes in the UK, in 2009 the Office for National Statistics removed them from its Consumer Price Index measure of inflation. Some wine producers are exploring more alternative packagings such as plastic bottles and tetra packs.