Why do wine bottles have necks?

No official answers, so I’ll try to reverse-engineer you some.

The neck gives the cork someplace to be. And I’ll bet that it’s easier on the glassblower than, say, a flat end. And it’s easier to pour.

And pray tell, how did you do weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?

Different wines, different necks, different bottles. Some shaped more like a Perrier bottle to flow bubbly champagne smoothly, some hippier to trap red wine sediment . . .

But mostly so you can hold ‘em easily while you drink straight from the bottle like the infamous gutter Irishman:

‘Twas an evening in November,
As I very well remember.
I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,
But my knees were all aflutter,
So I landed in the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Yes, I lay there in the gutter
Thinking thoughts I could not utter,
When a colleen passing by did softly say,
“You can tell a man that boozes
By the company he chooses.”
And the bloody pig got up and walked away!

All bottles have necks.

So it’s really why isn’t wine stored in jars, or tubs, or cans, or buckets. Or maybe why is wine stored in glass.

I believe that’s because they sit for a while once bottled, and glass is “the good stuff that’s been around for a while” if you want to store liquids for any length of time. It’s non-pourous and really inert.

As far as why it’s shaped like it is, I’d say @Nullo hit it on the head. It has to do with sealing the container. A smaller hole means a smaller area to seal and make air tight.

I decant my wine into mason jars.

I think it has to do with how bottles and other glass containers were originally manufactured.
Small blobs of semiliquid glass were put on a metal pipe and then blown up like a balloon. The pipe of course had to be thin enough to fit into the glass makers mouth. So you end up with a thin neck, that’s where the pipe was. The rest is tradition.

Having a neck also makes it easier to avoid pouring the sediment that gathers at the bottom of some red wines. Because the sediment is heavier than the wine, it will tend to be trapped by the “shoulder” of the bottle, while the wine goes on out the neck. Note that the wines that tend to throw the most sediment (port, Bordeaux) tend to have bottles with sharp shoulder/neck transitions, while whites (Rhein, white Bourgundy) usually taper gradually to the mouth of the bottle.

The future standard will be

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-in-box

Of course, for special occasions a bottle carries more emotion. Bottles have necks to allow slow pouring. But bags in box do the same. The ecological advantages are clear: less volume and less weight for transport. The corrugated fiberboard can be recycled.

Tetrapaks are for uncultured peasants.

Even the French folks are doing it. The wine tastes the same. It even tastes better the following day compared to a bottle you don’t manage to finish.

“2.23 million litres of wine was sold in bag-in-box in the big retail chains in France in 2009. This represents 24.4% of the volume! It is an increase of 17.5% compared to 2008. Evidently the bib wines are getting more expensive: the value of sales reached 530 million euros which was an increase with 20%.”

http://bkwineblog.blogspot.de/2011/04/french-catch-bag-in-box-bug-25-of-wine.html

“2.23 million litres of wine was sold in bag-in-box in the big retail chains”
That is the problem right there.
The Pappkartons might be good enough for the cheap plonk like blue nun, but anything that has any quality to it should not be raped by putting it into these boxes. It is offensive and borderline immoral.

Because like our mouths, shit poor out of it, so it makes sense that a neck be attached to the head and the mouth. :)
Ok, probably not the right answer but I assume its because it long and the most narrow part like our necks. Our necks funnel food and drinks like the neck of a bottle. So does other parts of our body, but that would make people probably not want to drink straight from a bottle. Urethra or penis would’ve been bad choices.
OOPs, read your question incorrectly. LOL, Perhaps its to make it easier to grab and hold onto, so your less likely to drop it.

@mattbrowne so true and so unaesthetic
Franzia is he future.

btw twist-off caps have lost their opprobrium. They no longer mean Thunderbird or Night Train.
Fine wine corks with markings are on their way to becoming another antique collectible.

Gather ye corks while ye may. And save your bottles for a bottle tree. Cobalt blue seems to be the best [followed by green] so treasure that Blue Nun.

Well, even more expensive wine is now available in bibs.

Remember how people resented cars at the beginning of the 20th century? Lots of emotion. How could anyone want to replace horses. People had to be convinced about the advantages of cars. There was a funny marketing campaign by Henry Ford.

Later it was about watching tv instead of visiting a theater. How unromantic. How can one not miss all the emotions present in a theater with real actors.