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itemsSeptember 4th, 2024
So let’s say you pop open a bottle of wine, or two, to have with dinner and afterwards there’s some wine leftover in the bottle. You have three options: drink it now, drink it later, or throw it out. As a man who is trying to sell more bottles of wine, I say drink it now and then buy more wine. But as a responsible adult who has things to do in the morning, I say it’s ok to drink it later.
Since the rule of thumb is that you should drink a bottle of wine within 2 to 4 days of being opened you’ve got a little bit of time to work on the good juice, but as regular reader Gus asked, what is the best way to preserve wine once the bottle has been opened?
I’ve written in the past about decanting wine, and once you open a bottle that is in essence what you’re doing. You are exposing wine to oxygen and the wine will change over time, typically it gets better with exposure to oxygen, reaches peak deliciousness, and then starts to degrade in something of a bell curve. If you don’t want to polish off a bottle in one night, then the goal is to slow oxidation and the change that results from it.
Of course, not all open bottles of wine are equal in their oxidation rates. If an open bottle only has about two or three ounces taken out, then there isn’t that much air in the bottle compared to one that has been drained of twenty ounces.
As for dealing with the remaining air, there are a series of gadgets that one can employ to achieve these goals depending how elaborate you want to make your wine drinking. Many have seen the little rubber stoppers made by the brand Vacu Vin that go into the top of a bottle of wine and then employ a pump to remove oxygen from the bottle. Not a bad way if you don’t think that you’ll get to the wine for a few days.
Years ago, there was a company selling little tubes of argon or some such gas that you would spray into the space of an open wine bottle before re-corking to replace the oxygen that is in the empty space above the wine. A device called a Coravin does the same thing, but instead of spraying the gas in with a little tube it employs a needle that goes through the cork extracting wine and replacing the space with argon, a much more efficient gizmo.
Instead of filling the space with an oxygen replacing gas, which sounds like a space-age way to drink wine, you could just remove the oxygen in the low tech method by putting the remaining wine into a smaller bottle. Does anybody remember the old flip top Grolsch Pilsner bottles? Those are great vessels for storing leftover wine as they can hold just about half a bottle of wine.
Whether you’ve rebottled your wine as Chateau de Grolsch or you’ve kept it in its original bottle, keeping the wine cold will also slow down the change. Sure, toss that bottle of red in the fridge, then just take it out 15 to 30 minutes before you want to drink it the next day, or be bold and drink that chilly wine.
Flip top bottles, argon, vacuum pumps, of all these options what do I personally employ you might ask? I’m lazy, I just stick the cork back in the bottle and leave it on my counter or in the fridge (for whites and rose). Sure the wine changes, but I usually wind up drinking it before it turns because the window of quality drinking can actually be much longer than you would expect.
I’ve had sturdy Spanish Tempranillo from Ribera del Duero drink well enough for more than a week. German Rieslings with residual sugar can drink well for literally weeks if not longer. Usually the only thing that keeps me from finding out is that I’ve finished the bottle.
If you don’t want to finish a whole bottle, paying attention to how a wine develops over a couple of days can actually be quite rewarding.
-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer
Need to reach me for all things wine? Email me at [email protected]
