Add Ons

Once you've bottled up your first batch of wine, and you're starting to feel accomplished, you look at that full bottle with the cork in the top, and... to be honest... it looks kind of plain. So, you grab the scissors and the colored pencils, markers, crayons, whatever, and you cut up a piece of paper from the printer tray into rectangles and you make your very own labels! This is the funnest route.

There are all kinds of fun labels and add-ons for your finished wine. I figured out how to print wallet sized pictures on my computer, and have made my own labels in microsoft paint, and you can easily find ready-to-be-printed sticker-labels out there that will give your wine a finer, more professional look. Best of all, it's fun stuff.

One of my favorite add-ons is shrinkable pvc bottle toppers. These are the plastic parts that slip over the top of the wine bottle that you get from the Wine and Spirits shop, but they can be fitted onto and shrunken right onto your own bottles! Talk about a professional look, these things make your wine look like it was professionally made and bought from a retailer. Once again, the best part is that it's fun!
So, if you've been playing around with wine, trying to get a feel for it, had a successful batch, and have decided that you want to keep making the stuff, it's time to have a little fun. Run over to the home brew store, or go to an online home brew shop, and get yourself some add-ons. They're inexpensive, a blast to put on (I apply the guys you see above by heating up water in the tea kettle and holding the bottle with the cap over the stream of steam until they shrink down), and they give your finished wine a great presentation!