Scored a few great sources of free bottles!

[Pumpkinman]

I decided to call a few of the local hot restaurants to see if they would save wine bottles for me, I got one definite, one I'm sure it won't be a problem, talk to my manager in the morning and one the owner wouldn't mind at all, give him a call tomorrow.
There are all very busy restaurants, I'm sure I could get a few dozen a week between them.
My goal is several hundred bottles, at the rate I'm starting batches, I'll need them!
Just a word of advice, after the first restaurant said "No", I looked up the menus for the other restaurants online, selected one entree from the menu, and proceeded to tell the managers how often we frequent their restaurant and how that particular dish is our favorite....lol
Tom

 

[Julie]

LOL, oh how devious one can be when it comes to acquiring wine bottles. Great score!

 

[Boatboy24]

Nice score! A little devious, but hey. Just follow through and go try that item now.

 

[Pumpkinman]

devious is something I can live with...LMAO!
Boatboy24...my wife told me basically the same thing this morning....

"we will go there and have that meal that you told the nice guy that you loved"

Looks like a win -win situation, I get the bottles and we got out for dinner...LMAO!!

Note to self...."no more telling white lies for wine making supplies".....Scouts honor!

 

[Boatboy24]

"White lies for wine supplies"? It rhymes, so it can't be all bad. ::

 

[Pumpkinman]

LMAO! Too Funny!

 

[Tom_S]

My wife's sister worked as a manager at a local restaurant so I had her save some bottles for me, but apparently her bartenders were a bit lax about saving them because I think I only got about a dozen.

My biggest bottle score was a few years ago on a tip that St. James winery was getting rid of all their corked bottles because they were going to all screw caps. So the wife & I made a weekend trip out of it and drove to St. James, MO and bought 17 dozen wine bottles for I think 20 cents apiece. I would have bought more but we ran out of room in the car for more boxes. While there we also got to do a wine tasting, and we even found another nearby winery where we did another wine tasting. Luckily we didn't sample so much that we couldn't drive home.

 

[Pumpkinman]

WOW! That is a score!
Right now I have three confirmed restaurants that are saving them for me, I'll see what kind of volume they can get me before I contact any other sources.

 

[bakervinyard]

Pumpkinman, Don't want to make you too jealous however ! I'm the bakery manager for a function facility and we have 5 rooms for parties upstairs. I have the bartenders save me ALL the empty bottles for me. LOL, Bakervinyard

 

[Pumpkinman]

nice!! do you ship?...lol

 

[Tom_S]

Not only did we score at St. James winery, but a while later someone on another message board offered about 12 dozen bottles for free. He is a homebrewer whose girlfriend was going to make wine, and well, some drama happened and he didn't have a need for the bottles any longer. Was just a 2 hour drive and I gave him a bottle of my homemade blackberry wine, which he later said he enjoyed. Only bad thing is these bottles still have labels, unlike the label-free bottles we got from the winery. So I'm set for bottles for quite a while, even though I still have people giving them to me. I just recently got about 18 1.5L bottles given to me.

 

[Pumpkinman]

very nice. I picked up a case of empty 750 ml today, Monday i'll go to the three restaurants and Tuesday back to the Super Liquer Store that is giving out samples for the holidays, they have 5 stations set up in various sections, Italy, France, Germany etc.
I hope it is a nice little score...LOL
You'll see me on that goofy "hoarders" show...lol

Tom

 

[Tom_S]

I'm sure that if anyone saw our garage they'd think we're hoarders.

 

[Pumpkinman]

I'd like to look at it as recycling, we are keeping landfills clean, one bottle at a time...lol....now there's a slogan for us...LMAO!!!

 

[dralarms]

I was getting my bottles from ruby Tuesdays, but it got to the point that I'd getting 24 bottles and there would only be 2 usable, everything else was screw top liquor bottles. I finally had to tell them I had plenty of bottles.

 

[Putterrr]

What about halls that do weddings? They go through allot of wine in only one night

cheers

 

[Pumpkinman]

dralarms, yes, I had to make a point of telling these places that I was interested in corked type bottles.

Putterrr - good point, there are few of those around here as well.