40 interesting facts about wine

Here are a few....

34 Wine is a sterile medium because of its high acidity, alcohol and low pH. Pathogens cannot live in it, which means it's very safe to drink. In fact, people used to mix wine with polluted or suspect water, in an effort to make the water safe.

23 The indent you see on the base of most wine bottles is called a punt. It collects the sediment in old reds and makes decanting easier; it strengthens a champagne bottle which has to withstand 4.5 atmospheres of internal pressure; it aided the stacking of inverted bottles in olden times; and the earliest bottles were more stable than if they had flat bases, which tended to be a bit wonky. Increasingly these days, the punt is for appearance.

7 Our most popular wine-grape, shiraz, originated in a Muslim country where the people don't drink wine: Iran.

(From TheAge.com -- What's in a bottle)