Taking labels off bottles

[Catch 22]

Soon I will be making my own wine for the first time. I have been saving bottles for a while, but before I begin I would like to remove all the labels. I would appreciate any suggestions you may have that will make this process easier. Thanks.

[Tabby]

Soak the bottles in hot water, they should peel away easily after a short while. Any sticky residue left from the label can be removed with white spirit.

[andersent]

Buy European wine. I've done the same and it seems to me the hot water treatment works great on Europe labels - more difficult on those from the US.

[glgsr]

I agree that getting labels off can be a pain and that the French bottles seem to relingquish them more easily than the American bottles. For those looking to save labels rather than reuse the bottles, the sticky pull-off things work pretty well. Sometimes they don't want to adhear properly, but usually one can at least get enough to recognize the label and then make notes below.

[Jerry D Mead]

Try a small quantity of soda ash (pool cleaning chemical), which seems to break down some of the non water soluble glues which are fashionable these days.

The wineries started using them so the labels would fall off in ice buckets and as a result have lost all the p.r. value of people soaking of labels and collecting them. Lots of restaurants used to present the labels from the wines you ordered that night as a kind of momento at the end of the evening.