There are a number of things we could have done better, at least in theory. Before putting the wine into them, the bottles were simply washed out with water and just left upside down in the sun for a while. So we're not talking about a perfect sterilization here! Then we used a garden hosepipe with a funnel to fill the bottles, with my thumb over the end to control the flow - this means the wine gets oxidated a lot which isn't good for it - the more correct thing is a narrow tube which you insert to the bottom of the bottle and I guess you can pinch the tube to control the flow. And it was only after putting corks into all the bottles that I remembered the shopkeeper told us to soak them in water overnight beforehand... although considering cork resists water I can't see this making a giant difference. Well, lessons for the next time.
The costs were not massive. Each bottle costed around 120Ft (40 Euro cents), and the corks and foils costed very little. Fancier coloured glass bottles would have been a bit more, about 160Ft, but for a red wine which will be stored in a cellar, colour wasn't important. The investment was the corking machine at 15000Ft (50 Euro), and it was worth it - there are cheaper models available but harder to use.
However even with considerable economy of scale, I cannot see how professional wine makers can make a profit producing wine which retails on the supermarket shelves for as little as a few hundred forints a bottle .
They make it out of fertilizer ;)
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