I can't belive I actually bought bottles :(

Shame on you Hawk.

I know, but . . .

After the first week, I had trouble getting bottles from the restaraunt. The only folks who wanted to offer me bottles after I offered wine back still haven't produced any.

I just don't have enough around to get by :(

hawk

This year, for the first time, I also bought bottles. I had a lot to bottle and was just too tired of washing and scraping them. I got brand new clean bottles from our local Presque Isle shop for about $8 per case. Not a bad price as far as I'm concerned as it saved me hours of work.

Been doin' this for years. With new ones you bring them home, rinse them out, sterilize them,fill & cork 'em, have a nice day. Plus you have case boxes to store them in. Probably got 200 used bottles in the cold cellar, think I finally found someone to take them. I always figure, as stated above, that you have to try to figure in the time factor & what your time is worth. Screwing with used bottles is a VERY time consuming pain in the keister to me. Even if I'm only doing 5 gal. batches, it still pays.

It's even easier if you skip the unnecessary rinse and sterilize part! Wine with the right alcohol, acid and SO2 should be sanitary itself -- new bottles should be clean and dry. No reason to do anything but fill and cork.

Greg, thank you for a clear, concise and accurate post.

Lum Del Mar, California, USA

Greg, Is there any "scientific or proven" facts that it is unnecessary to sterilize and rinse before you bottle? Everyone else seems to think that improper cleanliness is the root cause of most wine faults.

Al

Well, I rinse even new bottles just for the fact that they could have dust in them or cardboard particles or anything else foreign. You never know what conditions they were stored in at the warehouse.

I think the best sort of "proof" here lies in commericial practice: every winery I know of (60 within an hour's drive) bottles with the bottles straight from the vendor, no sanitizing at all. I bottled

Some wineries (with more money for a bottling line than we had) do rinse with water before the bottles get filled, but that's to rinse out cardboard dust. It doesn't, and isn't intended to, sanitize.

These are new bottles, of course.

Dave

Exactly. I would think if it was an issue, commercial wineries would not risk millions of bottles of valuable product.

Oh, I should add that improper cleanliness is an issue in wine but that is mostly before and during fermentation. Once a wine reaches a preservative alcohol level and has the right levels of SO2, it is mostly oxygen that is the danger.

Good point guys, I guess I'm used to reusing old bottles and they need to be washed/sterilized before use just in case there is some leftover mold/bacteria in the bottle. It makes sense that new bottles wouldn't harbor any bacteria except for a wee bit of dust. I still assumed that commercial wineries would still wash/sterilize before use anyway. My father never used to sterilize anything while winemaking, just a quick water only rinse. Even his bottled 20 year old wine, while not the best tasting, was not spoiled by any means. Even his 15+ year old barrel that he used for the primary fermentation was nowhere near sterile and the wine was OK (most of the time :-))

Al

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I don't think there is such a thing as a sterile wine. In order to sterilize the wine, you'd have to heat it to a rather high temperature and hold it there for some time. Or else, add chemicals that would ruin the wine. Wine has plenty of living organisms in it. Many bacteria are completely harmless to people and to wine.

Nobody sterilizes their bottles - to do so you would need to do something akin to canning, like in other food preservation.

This is different than being "sanitary". I believe you are talking about sanitizing a bottle. This means keeping the bad things in check. Not eliminating all living things. As I mentioned, prior to fermentation, there's a lot of bugs that would love to grow on the sugar-laden fruit must. Good ones and bad ones. Some may be harmful, some may spoil the juice. It is generally accepted that bacteria that might be harmful to humans cannot live in the inhospitable environment of 10% alcohol or so. And the bugs that might make the wine taste bad (spoil) are kept in check with judicious levels SO2.

I believe more and more wineries are using bottle rinsing machines. My speculation is they are mostly just rinsing with water. The amount of bottles some of these places go through - additional chemicals would add significantly to their cost.

It is interesting - when I started making wine I was very "anal" about washing every single thing that touched the wine with a strong sulfite solution. Bottles were sanitized, my stirring rods were sanitized, multiple rinsings. I still ended up with a couple bad batches. Now I rarely rinse anything with sulfite. I wash my equipment and bottles with hot water right away. I use a little detergent for stubborn things. If I see mold in old bottles, I will use a little bleach in washing. But other than that - wash with hot water, dry completely and store in a dry location. Never had a bad batch since.

I take a look at how commercial wines are produced. Grapes trucked up to the crush area, filled with bugs and dirt and - yes - even mold. They are all crushed up together. The use of SO2 has helped prevent most of the spoilage. All those "bad" things in the wine don't seem to hurt it at all. So, if all those things are in the wine, sterilizing or even overly sanitizing isn't going to make anything cleaner.

I think it was Lum who posted some nice statistics about the amounts of other things in a ton of grapes for wine or something like that. Very intersting.

Nope, a little further south, in Ovid NY. About 2 1/2 hours by car from Niagara. SHeldrake Point Vineyards,

-- Dave

Well....................you're not the only one, Dick! I too - when a sudden gush of blood ran to my head - did the same thing!!!

Greg, I suppose I'm still in the "anal" stage of using a sulfite solution for everything, but that may stem from making beer which, at 4-5 % alcohol, is more susceptible to spoilage. Thanks for all of the info.

Al

That'd be great! We're pretty far from the city, though--about 4 or so hours.

Dave

Maybe I'll stop by next time I drive to NY city to visit my relatives!

Al

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