For The Love Of Port

Wine racks made of wood and galvanised steel strip are very widely used, but they do have a small drawback - when removing a bottle from the rack, it is very easy to scrape the label (and particularly the back label) on the steel as you do so.

Little plastic clips are manufactured to overcome this problem, but they are difficult to fit, and do not offer complete protection to labels that are starting to get frail with age.

So here is a quick, cheap and very effective solution.

Get yourself a roll of 2" wide fibre reinforced tape - sold variously as Duct tape, Duck tape or Gaffer tape - silver colour is best, as it hardly shows once in place.

Cut of little pieces 1.5" long, and put them neatly on the metal strips, tucking the overlap onto the underside and firming down.

Bottles will now slide in and out without label damage (although I'd still be careful with a very old bottle)

So job done, labels protected!

n.b. If you have strong thumb nails, you can tear of pieces of tape quite neatly. If you prefer to use scissors, you will find the that the tape adhesive builds up on the scissors and jams them - a quick squirt of lighter fuel on the scissor blades every three or four cuts solves the problem.

Tom

uncle tom wrote: a quick squirt of lighter fuel on the scissor blades every three or four cuts solves the problem.

As I read this I somehow knew that explosiv substances would come into play at some point

Great tip Tom - I used to have these racks and hated them for just this reason :x

Derek

Sounds like it was a quiet Bank Holiday Weekend!

Great tip, thanks Tom....and i too figured some explosive material would come into play....just remember, NO SMOKING while fixing your wine racks

How good does it look after the passage of much time? After some decades in a damp cellar, will it be peeling horribly, but unremovable without leaving sticky residue?

Julian,

My experience of Gaffer tape (as we always call it) is fairly extensive in my big bad world of things that go bang - but it tends to be used for temporary lashing, rather than a permanent installation.

From the point of view of chemical stability, I think you will find that the fabric and plastic film components are reasonably stable, but the adhesive may well be be vulnerable to UV and possibly Ozone.

Cellars, however, are normally free of both.

Gaffer tape often leaves a little glue behind when it is removed, but this is easily cleaned off with lighter fluid.

Tom

BTW - you can get a vapour explosion with lighter fuel if you get the air/fuel mixture right - but it has no practical use in that department that I know of.

If you want a really good blast you need to play with some stuff that looks and feels like Marzipan. It's commercial name starts with an S and ends with an X... :twisted:

T

Now that the CIA and MI5 are monitoring the FTLOP, let's hope they enjoy Port too! 8)

The used of duck tape would certainly work well, but it is probably even more practical to use only wood in the construction of your wine cellar and avoid the hassle from the get go. Is it less expensive or just more durable to use the metal during the fabrication of a cellar project? Honestly, I have never seen metal in a private, commercial or winery wine cellar construction (as of yet) here in the US.

Roy,

The cheapest all wood racks I know of are close to twice the price per bottle, and each bottle occupies considerably more space than with the steel strip design.

Some hardwood racks are beautiful to look at, but the total cost of getting them made and installed can be close to £10 per bottle stored...

CIA/MI5,

I am fully licensed to store, use and manufacture high explosives!

Tom

Loosely related Anecdotal story...

In the 80's when Domestic Terrorism was at its height, within my job, I worked for a relatively front line department. It was part of our training to go on 'Satan Exercises', which was were the Forces Bomb Disposal teams did their training. As well as learning their trade, and what we could expect from them, they used us as pretend members of the public, in numerous pretend senario's in disused farmhouses within the grounds of Army Barracks(Often Catterick).
Anyway, at the conclusion of those exercises, they always put on a 'display' in the middle of the moors, where they would show the power of semtex and its buddies. Minute traces would blow mannequins to smithereens. But the one I never got tired seeing, was the 2 lbs of semtex, exploded a hundred yards away. The first time you saw this particular one, it always shocked you. You felt the hot flash of heat on your skin as you tried to pretend the explosion hadn't scared you, or made you jump.
The thought that this was the average size of explosive for the car bombs of the time, and how you would turn that car into a huge shotgun cartridge of flying burning metal shrapnal, was very sobering.

Oh well, probably bored the backside off you there, but its the story that came to mind, that I would have told, if we'd have been sharing a glass of Port into the early hours

Alan

One of my favourite demos when I do talks at schools is to put just half an ounce of explosive in the middle of a watermelon, which we then suspend a few feet off the ground (usually from the cross bar of a goal mouth)

It makes a splendid muffled boom (without upsetting the local neighbours too much) and the entire melon liquefies - there is no solid debris left at all.

- Great fun!

Tom

So can we make Vintage Port if we wrap some Symtec around grape clusters and detonate it :twisted: Seems easier and funner than stomping the grapes

I can just see the label - 'contains sulphites - and semtex'

Tom

How would the use of semtex influence the fermentation process ?
Since yeast cells become active between 8 and 35 C , and since semtex is much more malleable and its temperature range is greater than C-4 , I suspect the use of semtex would increase the stability of the must during the fermentation process

McCain

How would the use of semtex influence the fermentation process ?

Err.. believe it or not..

it won't...

- but a novel (if wasteful) way to paint the walls purple..

(as would other types of HE)

Tom

uncle tom wrote:

How would the use of semtex influence the fermentation process ?

Err.. believe it or not..

it won't...

- but a novel (if wasteful) way to paint the walls purple..

(as would other types of HE)

Tom

Tom , throw me some slack , as you can tell by my avatar , I haven't completed my studies in Explosives 101 .

McCain

My buddy Jamie made some really neat and super effective tennis ball cannons with lighter fluid.

Tomorrows Tip Of The Day.

Dont eat yellow snow.