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By Carlos Rabassa
November 14, 2001 -- New York City, NY
 New bottles are not expensive and are easy to order via homebrew.com. The proper shape and color of bottle are important factors in the presentation of wine, particularly when giving it away to friends, family or as business gifts (which by the way has helped distinguish our business among our competitors).
On the other hand, if you consume some of the wine yourself or if the receivers of your gifts return the bottles, recycling is a good idea. It also gives a lot of personal satisfaction.
We just collected a few tips to help in recycling:
1) As soon as you finish pouring the last drop from the bottle, quickly rinse it or at least fill it with clean water until you have a chance to rinse it properly.
After rinsing it keep it upside down. A wine shipping carton is the easiest way of keeping the bottles.
Prior to using them again you will need to wash and sanitize them. However leaving even a few drops of wine in the bottle can create a kind of dark fungus that will be very difficult to remove.
2) Some labels are very easy to remove; some are not so easy.
 Soaking the whole bottle in water for two or three days, helps considerably. We fill them with water, stand them up in the laundry tub and fill the tub until the bottles are completely under water. Our standard laundry tub is just deep enough for all bottles except the few long necks used by some white wine producers.
After this long soaking, we remove most of the labels with a serrated edge table knife, outside the tub so we don't clog the drain.
Then we remove the label completely, including rests of glue that stick to the bottle, using a hard plastic sponge. The hard plastic helps in scrapping the glue away. We prefer not to use steel wool because of the taste it could communicate to the wine.
For a final pass, we soak the sponge in household ammonia. We are extremely careful no to let the ammonia into the bottle. Having the bottle still full of water from the soaking helps in achieving this goal.
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Secrets of Making Wine at Home:
Part I
Let's imagine first that you are some independantly wealth wine lover who has, decided to start a commercial winery. Imagine also that you have plenty of time in your hands.
Wine Tips: A Letter Perfect Seal
So now that you've been making wine at home for a while, don't you think it's time to start adding those personal touches to your product? Nothing can make your homemade wine a compleate experience like an elegant touch or flair to the package.
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Great books:
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3) WARNING: Not all bottles are suitable for easy recycling. We learned this the hard way. After filling 30 bottles with wine, we realized a few bottles have a neck thinner than the standard and regular corks cannot be used. Most champagne bottles have this problem. Also some whites from northern Spain use a bottle similar to the standard Bordeaux but with a longer and thinner neck.
For a quick check, we found an old screwdriver with a plastic handle of the exact size to be used as a go-don't-go gauge.
4) After washing and rinsing the bottles we drain them using the convenient drain tree. Then we store them upside down in wine cartons until bottling time. At that point we wash and sanitize them same as if they were
new.
5) One of the most impressive details to achieve a good presentation is the wax seal (see: Wine Tips: A Letter Perfect Seal). A good number of bottles are consumed at home. Others are given to friends who return the empties with most of the wax seal still in place.
 
One of the beauties of wax seals is you can easily recycle them. We just keep them in the double-boilers so they are ready to melt next time we cap bottles. We standardized on two colors of wax, burgundy red for reds and green for whites. Someday we might be tempted to use the holiday red for the wines we give as holiday gifts. We recently saw them at a commercial winery in Long Island, NY and they looked really great, conveying the holiday spirit.
Cheers
Carlos
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Here are some other favorites: |
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 Concentrate Winemaking System: Includes:Two 5 UK gallon glass carboys, Carboy Brush, 6.5 gallon food-grade plastic bucket w/lid and spigot, #6.5 drilled stopper, #2 drilled stopper, Airlock (fermentation lock), 24" racking cane, 5' x 3/8" tubing, 3' x 3/8" tubing, tub of B-Brite (Sanitizer/Cleaner), Bottle Filler, Triple Scale Hydrometer, Winemaking book - "Jim & George's Home Winemaking"
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Bottle Wax:: PProvides a nice professional touch to your bottled wines keeping the top of the cork and bottle lip clean until uncorking and pouring time.
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| Who is Carlos Rabassa? |
e-mail: Carlos
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- Real Estate Broker in Queens County, New York City
- Home Wine Maker
- Wine Lover for 50+ years
- Electromechanical Engineer, ME
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