He sliced into a discarded champagne bottle with a tile saw for the first time in September 2009, and Adam Fetsch (HHS’05) admits, “I had no idea what I was doing.”

He learned, though, and now his Rewined Candles in Charleston, South Carolina, transforms more than 40,000 bottles a month into wine-scented candles sold in stores in all 50 states, Canada, Australia, and South Korea.

After graduating from Purdue, the restaurant business figured to be Fetsch’s long-term future in Indiana. But he and his wife, Jill (Kikkert) (EDU’06), grew weary of Midwest winters and decided to move “somewhere warm on the coast that was relatively affordable and had character. Charleston checked all those boxes.”

Fetsch was working as a restaurant shift manager in Charleston when he struck out on his own. “I had no money and credit-card debt, so I was looking to do something that I could start with nothing. I thought, ‘What could I get for free and turn into something else?’”

One day he noticed the restaurant’s discarded bottles. “We had a huge Sunday brunch, so we had a lot of empty champagne bottles from mimosas,” Fetsch says. “I bought a $40 tile saw off Craigslist and started cutting glass. I looked at making drinking glasses, jewelry, and other creations but nothing had a polished look.”

Eventually his wife told him to do something with the bottles on their porch or get rid of them. “It was out of desperation that I thought of a candle container,” Fetsch says.

He filled his first cut bottles with wax and oil fragrances purchased from local craft and health-food stores. Today Rewined trucks in 35,000 pounds of soybean wax from Kentucky and customized fragrances from a company in New Jersey. 

Fetsch buys 4,000 used bottles a month at 25 cents apiece from anyone who brings them to Rewined’s 18,000-square-foot plant, which employs 75, and purchases another 36,000-plus units from bottle manufacturers in order to keep up with production demand. Candles come in eight fragrances, from chardonnay to rose, starting at $28 each. Colombia, Japan, and South Africa are the international markets Fetsch is targeting next.

Regrets about leaving the restaurant world? Not one. “This is exciting every day,” Fetsch says. “It does kind of blow my mind, though. I was always expecting something good to happen, but how it played out has been a surprise.”