Yeah that video is the easy type of “wax” to remove which I am personally fine with. Unfortunately only maybe half are like that and many are the super crumbly types. Just using the worm is certainly the best way. However I use a Pungo all the time so I have to manually removed whatever wax is on top or it may plug the needle. I’m sure the same issue exists for a coravin. So I really try to avoid them, period as it is a real pain to remove the “wax” except in rare modern cases when it can almost peel off.
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They use a pretty thick wax that gets harder and less pliable with age. It would need a pretty sturdy cork to just pull through. This particular 15 year old cork was definitely not sturdy, needed to remove the wax from the top to be able to use an ah so.
With younger bottles (at least with the softer wax), I agree that the ignore and drill method works almost all the time.
BTW, it’s a Brewer Clifton Pinot Noir bottle in the video. That gives an idea of the thickness of the wax. Now imagine it when it’s older and less pliable.
-Al
I agree that the Belle Glos wax is part of the branding. Personally, I find their particular version to be an over the top and gaudy affectation. Somewhat usefully, it’s prevented me from ever buying a bottle.
Mostly, I’m happy dealing with wax or foils. I actually enjoy cutting off the top of the foils and almost never just tear them off. The only wax I despise is the shellac version that shatters and makes a mess. But, I’m fine with no foils (and they can be a PITA on a bottling line). Harrington dropped foils at some point and went to a branded cork.
-Al
“ignore and drill” works real well with Dunn’s Howell Mountain bottlings. That wax starts off hard and brittle. If you try to insert a corkscrew through it, you’ll have a mess on your hands and likely in the wine.
Some extremes to me…
DomP…it’s like they glued on the foil…so difficult to remove, especially older bottles. Cedric Bouchard…just slid it on, not even tight to the bottle neck.
I actually like the look of Champagne bottles with just the cage and cork!
Wax sucks two bags of dicks.
Wow Doc…how many bottles of pycm have you downed now?!? ![[drinkers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/82916bed5ad74ac8470bc04089d9758b0c80c9fa.gif "drinkers"){kind=small}
![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
By not using capsules starting in 2010 we literally had the cash to build an entire tasting room that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. No, of course we did not directly transfer money from “not purchasing capsules” to “saving for a capital project” but the point is we would have had to spend a bunch of money over the decade putting a tin condom on our bottles that most customers hate or at least disregard but instead we didn’t and it made the construction much more viable. There is nothing else we could have cut out that would have saved that much money while having no impact on our revenue. Easy.
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Thank you my wax haters! I know how to open it. It’s when it’s all crumbly and falls into the wine, all over my counter and I have to vacuum the floor that draws my ire.
Also, if you’ve ever worked on a bottling line (not one of the mobile ones) you know that the single greatest choke point is the capsuler. It slows the operation significantly.
Many, and while I hate wax his white version is the good kind.
Absolutely. Even some of the mobile bottling lines have trouble with some capsules. When Harrington still used capsules we sometimes had to station a person to put them on by hand.
-Al
Yup, I hate capsules when working on a bottling line. The smallest discrepancy between neck size and capsule size can screw things up, and it happens more often than you might think. Even if you’ve been using the same glass and capsules for years, sometimes the glass mold may change slightly and the supplier doesn’t alert you to that. Tends to be a significant issue with smaller custom crush clients who insist on lining up their own glass and capsules without having the knowledge/experience to do that right and then find out on bottling day that they don’t fit correctly. As Al noted, putting on capsules by hand is sometimes necessary on automated bottling lines when they won’t go on correctly otherwise, and that almost always slows things down. The most dreaded job on the bottling line: “capsule queen”.
As far as wax, a friend stabbed his wrist last month while chipping off hard wax from the top of a bottle. Lots of blood all over and a visit to the emergency room…
As far as wax, a friend stabbed his wrist last month while chipping off hard wax from the top of a bottle. Lots of blood all over and a visit to the emergency room…
I hope that wasn’t someone I know.
-Al
Wax, while looks nice, is awful to open. Get rid of that too!
Agree. I do what they say in the video and you are still going to get wax often times in your glass and bottle. I should not have to possibly cut myself try to get wax off the neck of a bottle.
Actually it is.
Years ago I came up with a pretty good method for hard wax capsules. It’s not pretty, but it works well and keeps MOST of the wax shards off of your counter and your wine. Take a double or triple paper towel and get it lightly damp. Wrap it over the hard wax, keeping it fairly tight around the neck. Then take a butter knife/meat hammer/any kitchen tool and give it light to medium taps all around the top and sides of the wax down to the lip of the bottle. Make sure you’ve done it all around in order to get the wax in small pieces. Then twist the towel up and off, pinching it as you lift so all of the wax pieces stay in the paper towel. You might have to scrape off a few little pieces, but this generally gets most of them and leaves most of the wax in the paper towel ready to toss in the trash.
Yes, I also use the butter knife technique with hard wax. I once chipped all the wax off a Tissot Trousseau I took for one post crush day mystery wine session. Took a little while, though.
-Al
I use a kitchen knife and generally knock off the wax on the back patio, where making a mess isn’t as big a deal. Breaking off the wax this way is not a gentle operation, though. My problem is remembering to do it a few weeks in advance when I’m opening an older bottle, so I can put the wine back in the cellar, the sediment has time to re-settle and the wine can be decanted.
That was a serrated foil cutter deep into his forearm. That’s the incident my sig references.
Capsules are absolutely the number one cause of problems on the bottling line. Even with capsule queens, poor fitting ones (various reasons) can have wrinkling and/or smushing problems, so the box fillers are pulling some ridiculous percentage of bottles off the line for another foiling attempt. That can lead to running out of foils, so the last bottles don’t get any. Then the winemaker will have to put them on manually later, or use those bottles as sample bottle or personal bottles, if it’s not too many. If they’re just too problematic, the whole day’s production ends up not getting capsules. That either marks the conversion point or another bottling truck day has to be scheduled and paid for just to put capsules on, or a day (or more) of workers manually capsuling.
One big producer that always had issues with a snug fit - not too bad, but always required capsule queens and about a 5% do over and maybe 15% “good enough” - did a bunch of research and found a sample bottle that kept their look and tested out fine. The ten thousand cases show up just-in-time for a multi-day bottling run. The bottles aren’t the same as the sample! Basically the same as before, so thankfully not worse. There’s no way to reschedule.
Then, apparently a common practice, was this new mobile line who intentionally omitted the fact they didn’t have a capsuler to the winemaker. Imagine a fast line with a full day’s wine to be bottled at that pace, you have just enough crew to do it, and “Oh, we need two people in the truck to capsule.” Luckily, I was able to get one extra (really good) person to come in to bail us out or a few of the wines wouldn’t have been bottled that day. Still, in 15 years of bottling, that was the most non-stop cardio demanding, where I was doing the job of two people on a fast line. All that BS because the guy wanted to make his bid look more competitive.