A Bottle Washer... Me?

Yes.

In preparation to bottling six gallons of wine, I need to come up with about 30 wine bottles. Asking family and friends to save old bottles is fine... until ti comes time to cleaning off the gummed labels and cleaning the insides. I have come to appreciate the great extent some wineries go to to make sure their wine labels D-O-N-T come off easily.. or at all. So far 27 bottles have given up the glue, so to speak. Six others will need to be goo-goned to become useful.

So after that all gets done it will be time to bottle brush and sterilize the insides before siphoning the wine from the fermentation jugs into the bottles. Usually this results in some spillage.

After all that's done the fun of corking begins. I'll soak the corks for ten minutes in warm water and then use the Portuguese floor corker to plunge the softened corks into the bottle to seal the neck. I'll try to take some photos to show the process. Cleanliness has been important throughout the wine making, but it is even more critical in the bottling phase.

The wine I will be bottling will be five gallons (25 bottles) of Barolo wine from the piedmont region of Italy. The other gallon (five bottles) is a white wine made from table grapes and Niagra grape juice. It was an experiment so we'll see how it goes.