My home wine making adventures have led to a couple of interesting discoveries.
As reported some time ago, my favorite local winery, "Warm Lake Estate" closed up shop. During past NiagaraCOOL tours, we visited there twice. Here is an interesting link: http://www.lenndevours.com/2010/09/living-with-the-ghost-of-warm-lake.html. So, while visiting my local home brew and winemaking supply store, I was surprised to find they were selling Warm Lake Estate's new corks. The price was very reasonable for top quality corks. I bought 200 and may buy more, so, if any of you have a chance to open any of my 2010 wines, don't be surprised by the printing on the corks.
Secondly, I recycle wine bottles and lots of friends save me their empties. I've spent the past 2 days sorting bottles by type, in preparation for cleaning and filling them. Generally, sparkling wine bottles can take a crown cap and there are two sizes of caps, American and European, which are a bit larger. I've observed that there seems to be a growing trend among American producers of sparkling wine to use standard European bottles. I don't know why. Perhaps they are buying European bottling systems. My stock of sparkling wine bottles now has 3 times as many European type bottles than American. BTW - most of the European bottles were filled with either Cava or Asti, but several are from CA and even NY.