While my thumb heals (the nurse says the stitches need to stay in 5 more days) I decided to detail my findings on wine label removal and a system that works for me.
I have 3, 5 gallon buckets filled with water to which I have added PBW. I think baking soda would work to help remove labels, but PBW also cleans out old wine and is potentially no-rinse, even though I do rinse at this stage.
Put the bottles in the oven at 250 F for 15 minutes. Take out a bottle and use a box cutter to catch the corner of a label and pull SLOWLY at a shallow angle from the bottle. This leaves more adhesive on the label, less on the bottle. Sometimes the label with tear or start to become divided with half left on the bottle. I move to another corner and try again to remove the label.
I have about a 40% sucess rate getting the label off completely in this manner. Some labels are made with weak paper and strong adhesive, or strong paper and weak adhesive, and every other combination. Weak paper labels will shred, so set these aside. We are not done with them.
For the labels that peeled off "cleanly" there is always a bit of residue. I have a roll of cheap, non-linty paper towels and a bottle of Goof Off to wet the towel and some rubber work gloves. Start wiping down the bottles until the gunk starts to dissolve. Some adhesive is thin and easy to remove. Some is thick and smears around. It is possible to remove this adhesive but sometimes I just get tired of the work and toss the bottle at this point. It does not smell great, but Goof Off evaporates completly, unlike some of the other cleaners like Goo Gone. I clean outdoors. I take these cleaned bottles and give them a soak in the PBW water to get any dried wine out.
Now, on to the badly peeled labels. You will notice that some of the bottles have glue that is applied in horizontal stripes. I show a rather poor example of one of these bottles. Sometimes it is very pronounced. You can see it by looking through the bottle at the back side of a label. This type of glue is water-based. Put these bottles in a soak for a day or two. Some labels will literally fall off. Louis Jadot labels come to mind. Others will need the help of a Labelnator.
I scrape these water-based labeled bottles into my wash tub in the garage and use a drain strainer that I picked up at Home Depot. You do not want label gunk clogging your drains! A Mr Clean magic eraser easily wipes off any remaining residue and I keep it handy. These labels should come off very easily
As for the bottles which have shredded labels and pressure-sensitive adhesive, you could soak and scrape them, and that works, but I have found it is better to recycle these bottles. Save your effort for really nice bottles. Plastic labels don't bake off and don't peel off easily either, toss 'em.
After all the bottles have spent a time soaking inside and out in the PBW water, I empty, rinse and dry on a FastRack. These are great you can get them on Amazon. Each FastRack holds 2 cases of wine bottles. When the bottles dry, I sometimes find 1 or 2 with a bit of gunk. I put these back through the cleaning system.
I estimate that I have been able to reuse about 75% of bottles. If your friends are saving bottles for you, that will be a lot of bottles. Also, you don't need to badger people to rinse their bottles, which I have found really never happens anyway.
I am always on the lookout for wine boxes to store my bottles. If you can find a source of champagne boxes these are great for holding the wider Burgundy bottles.
Cheers!
