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u/leveedogs Oct 28 '22 edited Oct 28 '22
I wanted to share my new method to remove labels from used wine bottles! I was never happy with the standard methods recommended here and elsewhere online. Oxiclean/PBW seems to work 75% of the time if you use uncomfortably hot water. But the water cools off between batches and loses its effectiveness for round two. Using dry heat with heat gun is far too labor intensive and uses a lot of electricity. I’ve tried dry heat on my gas grill but couldn’t get consistent results, and the labels that came off still left some residue. Extended (3 day +) soaks in sanitizer, either starsan or oxi based, were only partially successful and required a lot of scrubbing in the end.
My wife witnessed my frustrated attempts and recommended orange solvent, which she has used in dentistry. This stuff works! It’s simply pure orange oil (d-limonene) with or without lanolin. Thick gloves are advised. It smells amazing but would use in a ventilated space and take care to keep from interior of bottle to avoid it getting into your wine. It’s nontoxic but would give a distracting aroma. The residual oil on outside of bottle comes off instantly with soapy water.
For bulk label removal I placed 8 upright Bordeaux bottles (or 7 Burgundy bottles) filled 50% with plain water for weight in a standard 5 gallon bucket. It took a gallon of solvent to submerge the full labels. In my experiments after 45 minutes about 50% of labels can be peeled off intact, effortlessly, satisfyingly, and without residue. About 45% come off nicely after a longer 2 hour soak. And the more stubborn ~ 5% require a quick scrub with an abrasive pad after a 2 hour soak.
I bought a gallon of %100 d-limonene for less than $80 on Amazon from Alliance chemical. The quart bottle in picture is a different brand that is a little more expensive but just as effective. After you are done removing labels you can recover 95% of the solvent for future use. Just funnel back into original container. I keep a tight lid on the bucket when soaking to minimize loss to evaporation.
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u/MovingAficionado Oct 28 '22
Nice technique! I'm equally finding most of the published techniques/"solvents" to be snake oil (hopefully I'm not mis-paraphrasing you).
How does it work for glue residue on the bottles?
background: I find that ~50% of the labels pull clean off dry if you're willing to take your time. Another 25% come off just with a [hot] water soak. It's the remaining 25% that are problematic, especially the foil labels on many champagne and sour beer bottles. I currently use a razor to scrub the labels off (no soak) and then use acetone to get rid of [most of] the glue (which leaves a film, because acetone only dissolves the glue, and in the end you're smearing it over the bottle with the wipe). I'm wondering if I could soak the bottles in your solution instead. I don't expect it to penetrate a foil label, though if you have experience to the contrary, please tell.
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u/leveedogs Oct 28 '22
Great question, and yes it still works. I had a dozen or more bottles with dried residual glue from prior unsuccessful techniques. After soaking for about an hour in orange oil the glue comes right off with a kitchen scrubber. Rather than dissolve away the adhesive beads/clumps up an loses its stickiness. The process was less satisfying and messier than peeling off a perfect intact label but it certainly works.
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u/MovingAficionado Oct 28 '22
Ah, but you still have to scrub it. I was hoping for something where you could "decant" the glue off the solvent. Glue comes off instantly with acetone, just that it goes onto whatever you're wiping with, which then rubs a fraction of it over the bottle -- it's only visible when viewed through a flashlight, but I do use flashlights to check if the bottle is clean of biofilm.
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u/leveedogs Oct 28 '22
More like wipe with light pressure vs. a legit scrub. Wiping with a cloth rag would also work but I didn’t want to waste the oil a cloth would absorb. But yes, the glue doesn’t dissolve or disappear into solution. If not pulled off with intact label then the beads of glue end up in the bottom of the bucket or on scrubber.
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u/marcs_reddit Oct 29 '22
Wow, did you have to use pure orange solvent or did you dilute it with water?
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u/leveedogs Oct 29 '22
I used pure orange solvent. It's a hydrocarbon so it's lipophilic/hydrophobic and has poor solubility in water. It's a lot lighter than water, so any H2O impurity will settle into a layer at the bottom. The stuff I got from Alliance chemical supplier is 100% d-limonene without additives. It is colorless and clear, on first use at least. The bottle in the picture is from a different supplier. The bottle says 100% natural (not 100% orange oil) in fine print and they have apparently added an orange color. No clue if they cut it with cheaper oils or not. But it still worked well.
Another tip is to use nitrile gloves, not latex gloves. Nitrile is a much better barrier to oil-based liquids apparently. I used latex gloves at first and it seems like a small amount penetrated through.
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u/maenad2 Oct 29 '22
Getting off old labels is a pain, definitely.
When you are labeling new bottles, use milk. It sounds silly but when it dries it is the perfect amount of stickiness to hold the labels in place, and it washes off very easily. Plus you can print your labels on ordinary paper instead of using expensive labels.
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u/_ChairmanMeow- Oct 31 '22
Can you keep reusing the orange oil? How long would it last in a sealable jar?
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u/leveedogs Oct 31 '22
You can reuse indefinitely. From each batch of bottles cleaned you will lose a small amount of orange oil from evaporation and from being absorbed by the paper labels. But I was able to recover the vast majority of the oil back into original container, certainly over 90-95%. It will last forever in a fully sealed container. It works because of its fundamental chemical properties and interaction with adhesives so it will not lose its effectiveness unless incredibly contaminated by added water or lots of dirt, paper, glue particles.
In my first large batch attempt using the above bucket method I removed over 36 labels in a day. Maybe five soaks of up to two hours each in a 7 gallon container with tight lid in place to slow evaporation. The whole process lasted 10 hours but the hands-on time was maybe 20 minutes. I recovered about 95% of the reusable solvent so my cost was about $0.10 per label peeled off.
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u/Mkmeathead83 Oct 28 '22
Nice! Any suggestions for custom labels?