Reusing Bottles

Ever since I bottled the 2009 red, I belatedly realize that is worth saving wine bottles. Otherwise I need to pay around 120-130 Forints for new ones. That's about 45 Eurocents each. Multiply that by say 100 bottles, and it's a chunk of money.

Although I don't even drink all that much wine, I've now got around 120 bottles in the cellar, cleaned and waiting to be filled.  Plus a dozen or two more, waiting to be cleaned.

On the other hand, cleaning the damn things is labour-intensive and boring. First you need to get the collars and labels off. While many labels come off easily with soaking in hot water, some are stuck with some industrial super-glue that needs heavy duty treatment. Once in a while I fill the bath with piping hot water, dump in 20 or 30 bottles, and after a while, go to work to remove the labels.

Ah, but that's just step 1. They still need to be sterilized, this time with a solution of sodium metabisulphite in cold water.

And now, they need to dry out. This is harder than it sounds. Glass bottles stubbornly resist drying-out, in any kind of weather.  My technique is to leave them upside down for the best part of a day to let most of the water drip out; then I turn them right-way up, cover with sheets of kitchen paper weighted down a little so they don't blow off (the kitchen paper keeps out insects and dust), leave them in the summer house until the next time we visit - by then they will be dry. Finally I stopper them up with a rolled up wad of kitchen paper, put them in boxes and bring to the cellar.

The first batch I bottled, I didn't do any of this. I simply rinsed them out, let them drip up-side down for a couple of hours, then filled them up.  This is all completely against the book!  If they are not sterilized, bacteria and microbes can remain, ready to attack the wine - so sayeth the book. However, I'm not sure it made much difference at all. While a couple of the bottles went bad (the wine fizzed up when I pulled out the cork, and it tasted bad), there can be various reasons for this, and 95% were fine.

Similar goes for all the equipment we use - buckets, etc.  Theoretically it should all be sterilized, but in practice it would add an awful lot of time to the work.  It seems the average "man in the street" around here doesn't bother - in fact, I get strange looks if I propose sterilizing the equipment!