Celebrating the "Bottle-washer-in-chief"

You've heard the metaphorical title for an entrepreneur: "Chief Cook & Bottle-washer." Which, when you're into home wine-making, takes on another dimension. I'd be lying if I said that, since we took up that hobby, the second half of the phrase doesn't kind of annoy me.

See, our household has a sort of symbiotic relationship with the folks at the Train Station BBQ on St. Andrew's Street, who give us the wine bottles that would otherwise end up in their recycling bin. (Granted, some bottles end up in the recycling bin after all b/c their labels won't soak off--which basically makes us middlemen; no doubt the gentlemen who collect our recyclables think we're winos with very specific tastes. Oh, well...) Similarly, my co-workers have been known to leave at least a half-dozen empty bottles at my desk...although, mercifully, not on days when the office has had visitors.

But before wine goes into bottles, those bottles are subjected to a multi-step cleaning process. The first involves several hours of soaking in a solution meant to clean out any goo one the inside of the bottles as well as dissolve the glue of the labels. My husband has done so much of this type of cleaning that, even minus the labels, he can usually tell you the brand and type of wine. Then, immediately prior to bottling, we clean/rinse the bottles inside and out, and sterilize them (and the corks and all bottling/corking surfaces) in an iodophor solution.

But the thing is, even when bottles are recycled multiple times, it still takes much longer to sterilize them than it does to actually fill them with wine and punch a cork into their necks. I wish I could bring myself to think of the glass as "artisanially cleansed," but the sad fact is that our culture considers bottle-washing a second-rate activity. Why? Because--according to my stab at armchair sociology, at least--we're culturally programmed to aspire to an aristocratic lifestyle, one in which we are too important to clean up after ourselves. Thus, washing bottles--or plates or pots or linen or floors or what-have-you--is left to the untermensch scullery-maids and sundry lackeys.

Which, when it's said and done, entirely misses the point: When I'm cleaning a bottle, I could really care less about who previously sipped the wine that once was in it. I'm not working for them--even when "them" was me and mine. No, the "them" in question is the next person who tips wine from that bottle--be it someone in my house or friends or co-workers. Partly from sheer principle, and also because one of my first experiences with home-made wine tried rather hard to poison me. By "poison" I mean me literally having to crawl to the bathroom in the middle of the night to throw it back up...and being delighted at the feel of the bathroom floor against my cheek, because the tiles were so wonderfully cool. (At the time, I was too inexperienced to know that the wine's off-taste meant bad ju-ju, and I was trying to be polite to the person who offered it. My bad.) Needless to write, the experience made quite an impression on me, and it's not one that I would wilfully perpetrate on others. Thus, the obsessive focus on germ genocide.

But I don't think that it's merely "spin" to consider so-called "menial" tasks in their larger context. When businesses--particularly in a recessionary climate--talk about "returning to their core competencies," one of those "competencies" had darned well better be taking care of the customer. Because when that "bottle-washing" is trivialized (meaning outsourced), it says volumes--thicker than the Oxford English Dictionary--about the difference between corporate self-image and the capital-R Reality its customers inhabit.