Wooden wine bottle

Hi Alexander. It is a solid chunk of wood, but I tried to make it look quite realistic.

Hi Matti,

I was always intending to paint/stain it to make it look realistic, but when I made my first one I was going to make a carved label. It turned out that the wood I was carving in wasn't flexible enough at a carving thickness to curve around the bottle and stay together. So I just made a very thin piece of holly and ran it through my ink jet printer to put the image on it.

Here is a picture of the first one that I did. It was a gift for my wine making in-laws in northern Minnesota.

Thanks Matti! Giving them the wine bottle actually spun kind of a funny story. The wine making in-laws that I gave this to are very nice and intelligent people, but unfortunately enjoy Fox news and anything anti-liberal anti-Obama etc. (we get along very well if politics is not the topic of discussion). So, I told them that I was sending them a gift. Their reply was something of a joke (and paraphrasing); "I hope that what you are sending doesn't make ticking sounds." My answer to that was "the only ticking packages that I ever send go directly to the Fox news network headquarters." It was over email, but I am sure a little steam rolled out of their ears after they read my sarcastic reply. Then when they received it, the called me up and told me that I had more than made up for my earlier joke, and really liked it. They keep it on their dining room table.

Raven was the name of the black lab that they had for a few years, and they just had to put her down.

Clayton

Beautiful bottle!
Good to hear that the quality of wine could have been good in those days.
I have always wondered about the four (??) litres of beer which was said to have been needed because of the salted food. Is there any information about the beer at that time? Would we have accepted it?

I found a blogg where a Swede had ambitions to make beer like they did around 1600. He thought it would be difficult to get the right sort of barley. Hop was no problem, old versions are still cultivated. However, there was no information about the result.
Wallons began to emigrate to Sweden in the beginning of the 1600's to work in iron industry. They brought their way of making beer, which probably was beneficial. The beer was not filtrated or pasteurized like today. So the yeast was still alive, as well as bacteria from the water. The oak barrels were re-used, and there were traces yeasts/bacteria of the previous beer, which put an uncertain flavour to the beer.
So, in conclusion, I think we would clearly notice a difference compared with the beer of today. But beer was essential to the crews on the ships, there was no other way to get necessary quantities of fluid.