Reading a quite a few of the discussions about the Woot wines, and observing my growing collection of empties, got me curious... what do you all do with your empties and extra labels besides recycle?

I admit I'm mostly curious about the extra labels (scrapbooking?) but I have to figure out something to do with my empty bottles very soon, or my spouse is going to accuse me of being a lush. :D

tilandra wrote:Reading a quite a few of the discussions about the Woot wines, and observing my growing collection of empties, got me curious... what do you all do with your empties and extra labels besides recycle?

I admit I'm mostly curious about the extra labels (scrapbooking?) but I have to figure out something to do with my empty bottles very soon, or my spouse is going to accuse me of being a lush. :D

Take good pictures of the labels and annotate the pictures with your tasting notes. The start of a good cellar book!

If your consumption is shared by said spouse and leads to having your way with each other, how could said spouse reasonable object?

Recycle the physical empties.

Here's a good article with some ideas, but I'm lazy and recycle them. Kind of lazy, this place is small and I don't have space to hang on to a lot of things once they're done.

rpm wrote:
If your consumption is shared by said spouse and leads to having your way with each other, how could said spouse reasonable object?

Well he has an allergy that prevents him from drinking the wine, but he does enjoy the other side benefits of *my* drinking, so he doesn't object, really. I'm just getting ready for some teasing, since I put them on top of the fridge when I'm done, and it's starting to fill up. :P

Ooh, and thanks for the link inkycatz... Some of those ideas I hadn't seen before.

We generally just toss the bottles into the recycling bin, labels and all. We save a *few* labels (maybe 1 or 2 a year at most, if the wine is especially memorable, but this is rare; the last label we saved was that of an '82 Lynch Bages we shared with family after getting engaged, and that was over a year ago), but generally do not.

At one point we were using a dozen or so bottles to provide medium-term sub-surface irrigation for potted plants - basically as a poor man's aqua-globes - which worked reasonably well, but SWMBO wasn't too fond of the aesthetic and we have since removed those bottles.