I have mentioned in the past that I remove the labels off of wine bottles to help me remember wines that I have drank.  That is one reason some of the labels look so terrible.  I guess that I could go on-line and find beautiful pristine copies of the labels to show, but I feel that it could then be said “Hey maybe he is making up these stories.”  On the contrary, that is why I use them, as well as match books and some time menus.  We do have photographs from a lot of trips that we made, but some are lost on computers that have died, and some I may never find due to the way they have been stored.

When my Bride and I travel, especially for an extended period, where I don’t want to carry a bunch of empty wine bottles back in my suitcases, I take this old pancake flipper that I have had for years.  There is just even spring in the face of the blade to curve around the exterior of a wine bottle.  I take the empty bottle from the restaurant in a “doggy bag” and put it into the trunk of the car until we get back to the hotel.  I have discovered that most hotels use plastic trash baskets in the rooms.  I will put the empty bottle in the trash container, and then fill the container with ice.  For some of the longer trips I even buy a small bottle of ammonia, which I add some of the ammonia to the ice and just let the whole container sit over night.  The use of ammonia was suggested to me at a couple of the wineries that I have visited, because they had told me that the ammonia aids in the loosening of the glue on the labels.  In the old days labels came off perfectly usually without any additional labor than just using water.  The next morning if I am lucky the label has soaked off, if not the spatula is used to pry the label off, and that explains why the labels get so ratty sometimes.  If after prying them off, they still have residual glue, which is often the case with “self adhesive” labels (similar to the postage stamps that one now gets), I affix the label on to wax paper, which I also pack.   I then get out the hair dryer that is furnished with the hotel room and dry the label, which may also cause the paper to shrink in one direction or the other.

This all came about, during the early years, when I dreamed of actually having a wine cellar, instead of just a couple of wine racks.  I had saved every wooden wine crate that I could find in hopes that I would acquire enough to panel the walls of the cellar.  When I realized that I would never get enough crates that is when the label idea occurred to me, and I began amassing as many labels as possible.  I might add that this was a most pleasurable endeavor and I would recommend it to any one.  As you will notice that in one of the pictures that I am showing I removed some of the bottles out of the racks, so that I could show that there are labels even behind the racks.   This required many hours of work, soaking and then gluing the labels onto the walls; what I would call a labor of love, but I hope that you have a better idea of why some of my labels do look so tattered, but they are all beautiful to me and the memories that I have of them.

Now before I start getting comments about the tape that is sold that will pull the label off of the bottle, I may start using them and ask if the restaurant has a spare menu or a sheet of stationary as my new keepsake.