# Why are my bottles breaking?



## JeffOnWire (Feb 19, 2018)

I was carrying an unopened bottle of month-old wine by the neck when the bottom of the bottle suddenly separated from the body, releasing the contents to cascade down my leg and pool up on the floor. As you might imagine, my living room smelled fantastic, especially after we started mopping up the wine with paper towels and turned on the fan, creating a hyper-wicking effect accelerating the transition from liquid to gas. This should be an option for air fresheners! While this was an extremely pleasant olfactory experience, certain elements of which will almost certainly be repeated in the future, with much smaller quantities under controlled conditions, I actually had other plans for that wine and that evening. 

The bottle broke cleanly into two pieces with both pieces fitting together again with only one tiny shard missing (my bare toes are on the lookout). It broke a the very base, with the disk of the base separating right where it curves up to form the sides, but with uneven edges. I had carried the bottle across a room, down a hallway and a flight of stairs and a few steps into the living room when the bottom simply gave way with no warning or apparent cause. I inspected the area where the bottle was sitting and found no evidence of leakage. This is the second time something like this has happened to me; the first being some time ago (a year or more) when I picked up a bottle by the neck and the top three-quarters lifted away in my hand while the wine flooded over the bottom quarter which never seemed to move at all.

This is simply low-end kit wine and there is nothing exceptional to report about its fermenting or bottling. In both cases the bottle was of the type purchased from my local wine supply store. This bottle was not new (I reuse bottles); I can't recall whether the bottle was new or used in the previous incident. The wine is under no pressure (corks aren't pushing out, nor is there any noticeable pressure detected during uncorking). The bottles are all washed, sanitized and inspected before bottling and undergo the rigors of bottling (lifting, filling, corking with a hand corker, occasional clinking against its siblings) without incident. I've been making wine from kits for several years, but it's only been in the past year-or-so that this has happened. When it happened the first time I just attributed it to freak chance of the "meteorite crashes through roof and lands on sofa" sort. But now it's happened again.

Does this happen to others? I'm wondering should I not be reusing bottles? Is there some precaution I should be taking? I'm thinking maybe I just ended up with a bad batch of bottles, and maybe should just pitch all bottles of the same type and start a new collection.

Any thoughts?













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__ JeffOnWire
__ Feb 19, 2018



Base separated

















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__ JeffOnWire
__ Feb 19, 2018



Bottom of bottle with crack just visible around the base. A near-perfect fit.

















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__ JeffOnWire
__ Feb 19, 2018



The bottle sitting on the base


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## salcoco (Feb 19, 2018)

I just think you have been unlucky on two occasions. I have had new bottles break when corking, in both cases the side of the bottle blew out. in my case, two bottle out of thousands sounds like good odds to me.


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## stickman (Feb 19, 2018)

You may be unlucky as salcoco said, but it is a little suspicious, I've never had bottles just fall apart like that. The bottles may not have been properly annealed at the factory.


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## Stevelaz (Feb 19, 2018)

Glass termites?


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## sour_grapes (Feb 19, 2018)

I will say that that bottle looks pretty low-end. The glass looks thin and there is no punt to speak of.

Still unacceptable to be just randomly breaking. I think I would start building up your collection of bottles by recycling bottles from commercial wine, which tend to be of higher quality (the better to showcase the product).

Oh, and welcome to WMT! I like your writing style


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## Stevelaz (Feb 19, 2018)

Speaking of bottles, I just bought a couple cases of the green Bordeaux style and they have no punt. Is that a big deal?


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## bkisel (Feb 19, 2018)

Stevelaz said:


> Speaking of bottles, I just bought a couple cases of the green Bordeaux style and they have no punt. Is that a big deal?



Shouldn't be. I've used hundreds of green, brown, yellow, frosted and clear "flat" bottomed wine bottles and have never had an issue.


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## sour_grapes (Feb 19, 2018)

Stevelaz said:


> Speaking of bottles, I just bought a couple cases of the green Bordeaux style and they have no punt. Is that a big deal?



No, not a big deal. However, essentially all bottles that are cheap lack a punt. (The converse is not true: lack of punt does not mean the bottles are cheap.)


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## Scooter68 (Feb 19, 2018)

Not having the Punt makes it easier to use a filler wand. I keep running into bottles where the tip of the filler wand won't go down far enough for the tip of the filler to be activated fully. I have learned to center it on the peak of the punt but that takes more time. So for me not having a punt makes my filling task easier and faster.


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## sour_grapes (Feb 19, 2018)

Agreed. I switched from the "gravity" tip filling wand to a spring-loaded wand because the latter dealt with punts better. I still have trouble with the really deep punts.

(To be honest, I did away with the filling wand altogether, and just fill it from the top using the spigot on a bottling bucket.)


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## jgmillr1 (Feb 20, 2018)

Only time I've had trouble like that is with a bad batch of bottles from the factory. Worse than the one bottle breaking while carrying it is when the bottom breaks off like that while it is in a case and stacked on other cases! Soaked stinking cardboard and fouled corks on neighboring bottles.

Changed to a new supplier and my trouble went away.


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## Grabo (Feb 20, 2018)

Like others have said, the bottles from homebrew stores are pretty cheap, and the easiest way to cheap out on a bottle is to use less glass. When blow molding glass bottles, if they are starting out with less glass, then they are going to have a high probability to have an uneven distribution of glass in the mold. One of the more common problems you troubleshoot in blow molding is thin walls at the bottom corners of the bottle. It looks like your bottle in the picture had this defect, which isn't easy to see on a finished bottle. And when I say "defect" the bottle is still okay, but it is just not as strong as other bottles. I think you've just been unlucky with your bottles.

Also, holding the bottles by the neck doesn't help. I'm not saying I don't do that; I think it feels like the natural way to hold the bottles, but you're holding the thickest part of the bottle: the neck. The bottle needs support at the body and sometimes the bottom of the bottle because that is where it is stretched the most in blow molding. When walking and going up stairs, the wine is sloshing around inside the bottle and resonating force onto the body and the bottom of the bottle. If there were any thin walls or weak areas, they would be more likely to break from the force of the liquid. Kind of like in college when your buddy would slap the top of you beer bottle to make it foam out the top, or if they were mean, slap a capped bottle and blow out the bottom.

Keep in mind the punt doesn't necessarily mean the bottle is good. It's a bit more difficult to mold punted bottles, so the cheapest bottle manufacturers typically don't waste their time with them, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't try if they could make an extra penny (literally). None of us have time to measure the wall thicknesses and check the composition of the glass in all of our bottles, so our easiest way is to compare weight. Save the heavy bottles for the good wines


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## jburtner (Feb 20, 2018)

I have seen a similar separation of bottle-glass when dissimilar heat exposure nears the thresholds. 

You didn’t by chance use hot hot water to sterilize them?

Cheers!
Johann


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## BernardSmith (Feb 21, 2018)

jburtner said:


> I have seen a similar separation of bottle-glass when dissimilar heat exposure nears the thresholds.
> 
> You didn’t by chance use hot hot water to sterilize them?
> 
> ...



You beat me to it. I was wondering if JeffOnWire's method of cleaning and sanitizing his bottles may have contributed to the breakage. It looks very like the kind of stress break caused by rapid cooling after heating which may have been produced at the manufacturing plant but it can also be caused post production... I think


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