Using the oven for drying out bottles?

Anyone ever use the oven for drying out sanitized cleaned wine bottles? I have been doing this as a short cut to drying out the bottles. I just set the tempature around 250 and then let the bottles sit in there for 10 or 15 minutes. Then I turn off the oven and let the bottles cool off inside the oven. Seems to work really well.

Why do you need to dry them out at all?

I always thought that sulfite was a wet sanitizer.

I don't want to dry out my bottles- I want to bottle when the bottles are wet with sanitizer. If they get dry, they should be resanitized. Of course, I use "wet contact" and no-rinse sanitizers, like star-san and sulfite.

If I was going to use the oven, I'd skip sanitizing with sanitizers and use the oven to sanitize the bottles. If you bake clean bottles in the oven, and then let them cool, they would be sanitized.

I use the oven to get the bottles to dry quickly so that I can store them between botteling. I still wet sanitize them and rinse them before filling them with wine. I just didn't want to have a bunch of bottles/carboys sitting around the house drying out for a few days.

arkenbergcn said:

I use the oven to get the bottles to dry quickly so that I can store them between botteling. I still wet sanitize them and rinse them before filling them with wine. I just didn't want to have a bunch of bottles/carboys sitting around the house drying out for a few days.

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Ah.

Well, using the oven plus sanitizing them is doing double the work. But if you don't mind it's fine. I'm not sure of this, so double check, but I did hear that heating bottles over and over can cause some fragility in the glass. Since it's a gradual change both up and down, that might not be an issue- but I'd still check on the glass anyway.

What I do when I have a freshly rinsed bottle is just store it upside down on the bottling tree so that mold can't grow in it and the water drains out.