FoodBanter.com - Removing wine labels: A trick

For reference or mementos I've removed wine-bottle labels easily for about
30 years, from many but not all bottles, via a principle in use much longer
than that. (People who've done much wet photographic printing know this
principle implicitly or explicitly, and it shows up in various places,
including I think some of the home "formula books" so popular as references
in late 19th and early 20th c. in the US.)

The principle is that various gelatinous and albuminous materials tend to be
softened by alkali and hardened by acid. This applies to "animal" and other
natural glues although it is no help with some plastic-type glues which I
have seen gradually increasing in use with wine labels (they are commonplace
under tin-can labels and labels for various plastic packaging).

Armed with this useful principle I load a batch of bottles upright in a deep
pot such as an 8-liter (8-quart) pasta pot. Fill the pot (and the bottles
too) with warm-to-hot tap water and add a tablespoon or two of clear
household ammonia to the water in the pot. That's a convenient, low-residue
source of alkali. Forget about it for a few hours, or overnight; then on
revisiting the pot, many labels will slide or peel off easily, very intact
(or will have lifted off by themselves), ready for drying on a towel. For a
flat label, do the last of the drying between sheets of absorbent paper
under a weight, and for a very smooth clean surface, do this with plastic
film against the front side of the label and absorbent paper against the
back. (I nearly wrote "obverse" for the front side -- as in "obvious" --
common technical or trade talk; but I remembered that lately for some reason
some people in my country have written "obverse" when they mean "reverse"
and this has robbed the word of utility. O the times ...)

(Some labels with synthetic glues will be hopeless for clean removal like
this.)

-- Max