W
WaterWolf
Guest
I recently took up a new hobby. No, it's not bottle collecting, it's wine making. I started making some blackberry wine in October and while I was looking around the house for something to ferment it in I found an old stoneware jar/bottle. It works fine but recently I've been told that the glaze on some old stoneware and ceramic containers contains lead which could leach out if you put an acidic substance in it (ie. wine). So I've been trying to figure out if my jar could be covered in such a glaze and if it could end up killing me ! I don't know the origon of this bottle, aparently my parents found it in the attic when they moved in.
I can't show you a photo at the moment as my camera is broken so I will have to describe it. The jar is a one gallon container shaped simply as a cylinder at the bottom and a cone above that with a large lip/spout at the top. The jar is about a foot tall. The bottom cylinder is a white / grey colour and the top is a yellow / brown colour. There's a rounded handle on the cone part of the bottle. Across the front of it is 'IREL' in big letters with each letter in an overlapping circle. The cone part is indented with a stamp that says 'Govancroft Pottery Glasgow' with the number 11 in between the words. There is also a larger number 1 stamped on the cone but I think this refers to its one gallon capacity.
I would very much like to know if my bottle is safe or whether I should throw out my wine ! Any advise would be gladly accepted.
I can't show you a photo at the moment as my camera is broken so I will have to describe it. The jar is a one gallon container shaped simply as a cylinder at the bottom and a cone above that with a large lip/spout at the top. The jar is about a foot tall. The bottom cylinder is a white / grey colour and the top is a yellow / brown colour. There's a rounded handle on the cone part of the bottle. Across the front of it is 'IREL' in big letters with each letter in an overlapping circle. The cone part is indented with a stamp that says 'Govancroft Pottery Glasgow' with the number 11 in between the words. There is also a larger number 1 stamped on the cone but I think this refers to its one gallon capacity.
I would very much like to know if my bottle is safe or whether I should throw out my wine ! Any advise would be gladly accepted.