I’m a relative Port neophyte and have struck out on Google with a question I had regarding bottles of 2007 Graham VP I received today. I noticed there was a little white dot under the labels about the size of a finger print. What’s with this white dot? Is it a vestige relating to turning bottles? I’ve read that some folks mark the punt of heat damaged bottles with a white dot before returning them to the shipper but I don’t think that is what is going on here. Thanks.
Two things: First, no one turns bottles of port or anything else (except sparkling wine PRIOR to disgorgement). Or at least, they shouldn’t.
I’m not Roy, but I believe the paint is to indicate on which side the bottle was resting prior to labeling.
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The paint you have seen is mostly used by the SFE (Symington Family Estates) these days. They own about 10 major Port shippers such as Graham, Dow & Warre and many others you’ve heard of. There are others who still hand paint the “splash” mark on bottles to show which side should face upwards when the VP bottle is laying in a rack to mature slowly. This way you always know that the sediment has settle 180 degrees from the splash mark. At one time its use was far more prevalent but today it is nearly a thing of the past and that is not what I call progress.
Thank you for your responses. You’d think that with the advent of labels, a white splash wouldn’t be needed to show which way is up.
The white is for the period before the wine is labeled while it is resting in their cellars.
There’s always a curve ball…Niepoort is the only Producer I know where the white paint marks indicates the side of the bottle facing down, not up. Thankfully, to my knowledge, they stopped marking the bottles with paint. ![[swoon.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f425e8dac3e7344bee264da02e55428971be23a9.gif "swoon"){kind=small}
Now a couple Port companies are using bottles that have a raised “tab” of glass in the punt area. The tab replaced the hand-painted white paint splash. Though I haven’t seen very recent bottles with it, so I don’t know if they’ve given up on it altogether.
Actually, I believe the tab on the punt is for the bottling and labeling machine, so that the machine knows which is the front of the bottle, useful when there are things like the embossed glass on many bottles of port and also Chateauneuf du Papes to line the labels up properly. But it could also be used when manually stacking unlabeled bottles for aging.
I’m sure that’s the case for some producers. But I’ve been specifically told by a Port producer they, at the time, had it added to their existing bottle shape design so they didn’t have the added labor costs to paint the splash mark on their VP’s.
Would you mind sharing which producer?
OK, but I’m not sure there is any labor cost savings when the person stacking the bottles has to look at the punt and line up all the tabs properly, instead of just quickly stacking the bottles randomly and later having someone quickly dab them with a splash of paint.