Parts of a Bottle – Finish, Neck, Shoulder, Body and Heel

All 12 parts on the diagram

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Glass bottle 8

Neck The narrowed part of the bottle. It is under the finish and above the shoulder.
Body The main part that holds the contents. It is between the shoulder and the heel.
Base The bottle's bottom: the surface it stands on.
Mouth (bore) The opening at the finish's top. The contents come out here. Glassmakers call it the bore.
Shoulder The sloping part between the base of the neck and the body.
Lip (rim) The finish's top surface, where the mouth begins. It is also called the rim.
Heel The lowest part of the side. The body curves into the base here.
Finish Everything above the neck. It was the last part a glassblower finished, and the cap or stopper seals on it.

Wine bottle 4

Cork By tradition a cork seals a wine bottle.
Label The paper on the bottle's body that says what is inside.
Foil (capsule) A protective sleeve over the top of the bottle and its cork. It is commonly called a capsule.
Punt (kick-up) The dimple in a wine bottle's bottom. It is also called a kick-up or push-up. Nobody agrees on what it is for.

How this list was compiled: Every name checked on 2026-09-30, a name kept only where two independent sources use it. (1) Bill Lindsey, Historic Glass Bottle Identification and Information Website (Society for Historical Archaeology and US Bureau of Land Management), Bottle Morphology, read in the Internet Archive copy of 2023-02-25: finish, lip or rim, bore or mouth, neck, shoulder, body, heel, base, push-up or kick-up, https://web.archive.org/web/20230225195226/https://sha.org/bottle/morphology.htm. (2) Dale L. Berge, Simpson Springs Station: Historical Archaeology in Western Utah (Bureau of Land Management, 1980), read as full-text search passages on the Internet Archive: the six sections finish, neck, shoulder, body, heel and base, and the kick-up, https://archive.org/details/simpsonspringsst00berg. (3) Wikipedia, text only: Bottle, Glass bottle and Wine bottle (mouth, neck, shoulder, heel, base, lip; cork, foil or capsule, label, punt or kick-up), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_bottle and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_bottle. (4) For the cork, foil, capsule and lip of a wine bottle: Suzanne Von Drachenfels, The Art of the Table (Simon & Schuster, 2000), read as full-text search passages, https://archive.org/details/artoftablecomple0000vond. Hints and detail lines are in our own words. Licence: own work

The drawing: Drawn for this site on 2026-09-30 from plain geometry; no maker's bottle, nothing traced. Licence: own work

How it works

These are the parts of a glass bottle as glassmakers name them, from the finish at the top to the base. The second drawing adds the parts of a wine bottle: cork, foil, label and punt.

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From the top down

The finish is everything above the neck: its top edge is the lip and its opening is the mouth. Below it come the neck, the sloping shoulder and the body, which holds most of the contents. The heel is where the side curves into the base, the surface the bottle stands on. On the wine bottle, the foil covers the cork, and the dimple in the bottom is the punt.

Finish sounds like the end, but it is the top: the last part a glassblower finished.
Heel and base are neighbors: the heel is the curved edge, the base is the flat bottom.

Questions and answers

What is the top of a bottle called?

The finish. It is everything above the neck, the part a cap or stopper seals on. Its top edge is the lip, or rim, and the opening is the mouth, which glassmakers call the bore.

What is the bottom of a bottle called?

The base is the surface the bottle stands on. The rounded corner where the side curves into it is the heel. A dimple pushed up into the base is a punt, also called a kick-up or push-up.

What are the parts of a wine bottle?

The same as any glass bottle, plus four of its own: the cork that seals it, the foil or capsule over the cork, the label on the body, and the punt, the dimple in the bottom.

Why does a wine bottle have a punt?

There is no agreed answer. Common explanations are that it is left over from hand-blown bottles, that it makes the bottle stand steadier, that it gathers sediment in a ring, and that it strengthens the bottle.