What To Do With Unfinished Bottles Of Wine... or What Gifts You Should NOT Get For That Wine Lover In Your Life
The number of devices that have been invented to preserve wine from one day to the next could lead a reasonable person to believe that the great problem facing humanity today is not what to do about the excessive C02 in the atmosphere, but what to do with the excessive O2 that gets into an opened bottle of wine.
Over the years - in an utterly selfless act of assuming the role of wine-test-dummy to solve this very problem - I have tested nearly every wine preservation device, strategy, or gas known to humankind. For the furtherance of science, and ultimately for you, dear reader, and the maximization of your wine-drinking pleasure, I have subjected myself to partially drinking countless bottles of wine... and then attempting to preserve those bottles until a later day (when I would finish drinking them).
It was arduous, grueling work, and I wouldn't have been able to persevere without the higher purpose of your happiness. But now, after an exhaustive 15 year (plus) study, I can finally relay the life enhancing findings to you.
I realize that asking what to do with leftover wine may be like asking the parents of multiple young children what they should do with their spare time. Your response may be a burst of laughter or a confused stare, befuddled by the assumption that a thing called "leftover wine" or "spare time" could ever exist. I might as well be asking about how to educate unicorns with learning disabilities.
If so, good for you. Your drinking habits and your physical fortitude are robust.
For many of us, though, who enjoy wine but not inebriation with dinner, and who are currently quarantined in isolation or have spouses or significant others with a hummingbird's tolerance, a bottle of wine is more than enough for two or even three meals.
On these occasions the niggling fear that we have internalized - presumably because of all the fear-mongering that must be used to sell the preservation devices - is that the poor, innocent, unprotected wine will (horror of horrors) change!
Let this truth perform a coup de grace on your fears: whether you use a preservation device or not, your wine will change.
In a real and somewhat profound sense, wine is change in a bottle. The attempt to make it otherwise actually ruins what is essential about it.
Yes, you can protect a wine from change with a huge dose of sulfites, in the same way that you can protect your child from harm by sealing them in a bulletproof bubble and never letting them out of the basement. It's not good for the child or the wine to be protected in these ways. The absence of change is death, and, trust me, you don't want that in your wine. Or your child (usually).
Thus the first step in figuring out what to do with an opened and unfinished bottle of wine is philosophical acceptance that every glass you drink from the moment you pop that cork will taste different. Embracing this truth helps alleviate the anxiety that results from being so precious about our wine.
On the practical and scientific side, I have found that unless you are willing to spend over $200 on a device, there is no noticeable advantage to using some weird technique, inert gas, vacuum pump or other alleged preservation device. Simply sticking the cork back in the bottle and putting the bottle in the fridge overnight achieves the same level of preservation.
The next day, just get your reds out of the fridge about 45 minutes to an hour before you want to drink them (depending on your home temperature) to allow them to warm up a bit.
Will the wine be the same as the first night you drank it?
Nope. But it might taste even better!
Certain wines improve with moderate exposure to oxygen. It's like fast-forwarding the aging process. And it depends on your tastes too. You might discover that you like a little oxidation in your wine.
Now, leaving an opened wine in the fridge for more than a week is probably going to change the wine for the worse. Feel free to experiment, of course, but honestly if you can't finish a bottle in a week you may want to see a doctor... or start investing in more delicious wine.
What about those $200+ devices you ask? Well, I mean, what's the point? First of all, those devices have $20 replaceable cartridges and are highly breakable, so $200+ is just the start.
But also, using a $200 device to preserve a $50 wine that you didn't finish because it was a school night generally means that you have money to burn. If that's the case, just buy 3 of those $50 bottles and decadently pour any leftovers down the drain, you baller you. Or, you know, give the dregs to me... your wine-loving friend who doesn't have money to burn.
For everyone else, how often do you really open a fancy bottle and not finish it? And if you don't finish the non-fancy bottle, who cares about having it perfectly preserved from one day to the next? You might be surprised to find that you like it better without preservation anyway.
So please, don't buy yourself or the wine lover in your life any wine preservation devices as gifts this holiday season. Just buy wine.
Please join our email list to get other great gift ideas based on years of wine trial and error.