What’s the first thing you notice on a wine bottle? The label, right? Because in addition to the name of the wine, there are wine labels with gorgeous artwork on them. Some have funny pictures. Others are holographic or high tech. Each one is a tiny work of art. Lots of people save their wine labels, and I am one of them. I keep them in a notebook and every once in a while I love to glance back at them and remember where and when I sipped on the wine.
But in order to save the labels, you have to get them off the bottles. Because if you try to save the bottles, you’ll need a new house eventually as they tend to take up lots and lots of room. There are a lot of different ways to remove the labels – soaking in water works, but kind of ruins the labels. There is also some special tape that you lay over the label and peel off. I haven’t had any luck with that one. And so after lots of trial and error, I have resorted to baking my wine bottles.
It makes sense, if you think about it. The labels are pasted onto the bottles with glue. And if you can soften up the glue, you can get the label off. I have heard that some folks use a blow dryer to soften the glue, but that is kind of awkward and time consuming. The baking is what works for me. Here are my step-by-step instructions:
Collect those bottles. This is the fun part. Once you have a nice collection of empties, you are ready to peel. I like to wait until I have about 8 bottles, which fit into my oven nicely. (The only real drawback to this is that once you remove the labels and recycle the bottles, your recycling men think you have had one amazing week and are well on your way to liver failure.) I used three bottles for this post to keep it simple, so my recycling guys were not shocked this time. Have some paper ready to re-glue the labels onto.
Preheat your oven to 215 degrees. Make sure you remove any caps or corks from the bottles. Then simply lay them in the oven and set your timer for 15 minutes.
That should be enough time to soften the glue on the labels without baking it dry. Using an oven mitt, remove one bottle at a time. Hold it by the neck and place it on a firm surface. I use a marble cutting board that won’t scorch from the hot bottle.
Holding the neck of the bottle with the mitt, gently lift off one corner of your label. You’ll know right away if the label will come off easily – the corner will lift off smoothly. I should tell you now that not all labels will come off this way. I don’t know if it’s the paper they use for the labels or the glue or what, but certain labels it’s also known, never come off for me. Charles Shaw wines, also knows as Two Buck Chuck, have difficult labels. Ditto some Italian wines.
But if the label starts to peel off, lift off a bit more of the corner, then slowly, very slowly, continue down the side. Once the side is lifted off, you can slowly peel away the label entirely. If you have trouble peeling the entire side, lift off another corner a bit and work your way up the label. The whole idea here is to go slow!
When the label is off, you can simply paste it onto the paper. There will usually be enough glue left for it to stick nicely. I use plain old printer paper, but if you want to get fancy you can use card stock or colored paper. And I remove both labels – front and back because when I write about my wines for my blog, I often need to refer to the back of the label for bits of technical info. If you don’t care about that, just save the front label.
So now you have a nice memory of that bottle of wine. You’ll also have some empty, bare wine bottles that you can use for various other crafts. More on that later, but for now, enjoy the memories!
Cheers!
You can find my other wine reviews on The Winey Mom.
