By D. J. McAdam.
I purchased, some time ago, one of those electric wine cellars, the kind with the nice glass door that keeps the temperature at a constant 58 degrees (which one can adjust, upwards or downwards). It holds 28 bottles, and I've yet to see the thing full, but it looks nice, and purchasing it has had the positive effect of causing me to buy better wines. But this article isn't about wines per se, or even wine refrigerators; it's about wine labels.
You see, now that I've started enjoying better wines, my collecting instincts have kicked in. I considered at first keeping one of those wine diaries, where I could record my impressions, but truth be told, I'm too busy and too unimaginative to fill up some diary with statements like, "an impertinent little wine, with a fruity nose, and hints of cardamom and smoky Canadian bacon...."
Then, one night, when actually working on organizing my philatelic cover collection, I came across a couple of very nice ring binders from Safe Publications of Germany that had been stored out in my garage. I haven't decided yet whether the binders are the solution to my storage needs for that collection, but while looking through the pages of Safe's catalogue to see what was available for the binders I had, I came across pages designed to hold wine labels.
The question, of course, is how best to remove the label from the bottle, and it's not an easy one to answer because, just as in stamp collecting, soaking doesn't always work as well on synthetic glues as it does on natural glues. I did some research, and here's what I've come up with thus far, which I hope will be of some use to you if you decide to collect wine labels:
I'm not using a razor of any kind to get a label off a bottle. My fingers are worth more than any wine label.
I'm not putting an empty wine bottle in a hot oven. Let's get real here. Does this seem dangerous to you? It sure seems dangerous to me.
Basically, because I don't want to do anything too dangerous, I'm left with the soaking method. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, I'll live. I'd like to get a big, open pitcher just a little bit bigger around than a wine bottle - right now, I'm using a big empty soda bottle that I've carefully cut the top off of. The idea is to put hot water in the empty wine bottle, which goes in the pitcher (or soda bottle), and then hot water in the pitcher. You need to leave it that way long enough for the label to soak off, and then you dry the label face down, so the glue doesn't adhere to something else. I dry the label face down in a stamp drying book, which was made for drying stamps that had been soaked.
I haven't ordered the special wine label pages yet, but at least I know where to get them.
So there you have it - one more thing to collect!
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