Why is there a dent at the bottom of red wine bottles?

There are 4 reasons for the dent in the bottom of the bottle (properly called the “punt,” which I will refer to it as hereafter).

1. Historical: The punt was originally put in the bottom of a bottle because it’s extremely difficult to hand-blow a bottle with a flat bottom that you can safely set on a table without tipping over or wobbling. However, if you push the bottom in and create a punt, imperfections in the surface don’t touch the table, and you merely need a flat-ish ring of the bottle contacting the surface, a much easier thing to do by hand. We don’t have as much of an issue with this sort of thing in modern days (modern wine bottles are made en masseby machine, and imperfections are rarer), but we keep the punt partly out of a sense of history. 
2. Practical: the punt makes it slightly easier to grip the bottle and pour with a bit of flourish (you put the thumb of your dominant hand in the punt and hold the bottle with your fingers, and you can pour with the bottle outstretched and the label fully visible).
3. Psychological: Consumers expect bottles to have a punt, and bottles without one are seen slightly as being “lesser” than ones with larger punts. Next time you’re in a wine shop, pick up a couple of bottles of the more expensive wines; they’ll generally have deeper punts (and thicker, heavier bottles) than comparable but less expensive wines.
4. Psychological (again): When sitting on a shelf in a wine store, a bottle with a large punt takes up more room, both visually (as the bottle will have a higher shoulder) and often in terms of bottle diameter (which has the added effect of limiting the available space on the shelf, pushing competing wines out), as the punt is volume that’s notholding wine. That means that prospective wine buyers see the bottle as subtly bigger, and the bottle stands out a bit on the shelf because of it. Therefore, a big punt can act to increase sales, and decrease sales of competing wines.

Tyler Haas - selling fine wine and spirits for more than a decade.

Editors note:

Readers who responded to Tyler’s article were divided as to whether a bottle with a punt tells people that it is a good wine over a bottle that has no punt. One reader pointed out that the punt is an indication of estate bottling as opposed to off-site plant bottling. Some among those who have a wine cellar were peeved that the wide-diameter of the bottle due to the punt, made it harder to fit into the racks. Queried by a reader as to why most wine bottles are 70 cl. another reader explained that in those days when bottles were hand blown, that was the size a glass-blower could create with one breath, on a regular basis – which to a great extent relates to the average volume of one exhale (700 – 1200 cubic centimeters), so 700 -750 cc.. makes sense (1 cc=1ml). There is however no absolute proof of the matter though.

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