Friday 14 February 2014

Wine bottles



We keep every glass jar we can lay our hands on. We need them for our preserves. Before now, however, we have not kept wine bottles. We don't get through that many anyway. However, we want to put an end to buying the occasional bottle of wine so last autumn we turned our hand to wine making. For me, this was a new experience. For David, it was a return to an old hobby. 10 demijons of red and white wine were left to ferment. They are now ready for bottling. With insufficient bottles of our own, we had to buy in a stock of 2nd hand bottles from a wine-making shop at Newbottle in Houghton-le-Spring near Sunderland. We headed there this morning to collect 70 of them. This afternoon we soaked them in the bath to remove the labels. Next job will be to sterilise them. And then comes the bottling and after that comes the sampling session.



The demijons have been kept in our spare room. We use the same room to store our pumpkins and marrows and keep the incubator and the chick brooder.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you not have the glass recycle boxes where you are? I know it sounds a bit icky but I look in them as I go down the street & help myself. No problem once they are washed & sterilized

Jonathan Wallace said...

Bottles go into big wheelie bins for recycling so I'd have to empty them out and fish through all the card, plastic and cans to find the bottles. And technically, it's illegal to take the waste.