A couple of ground rules: fuller-bodied wines will last while open for longer than more delicate styles. Furthermore, wines of exceptional balance and quality will undoubtedly last for longer than lesser examples. I’m often surprised at how much better some deeply flavoured and tightly structured red wines actually are the following day. In itself, that is also a very positive indication that the wine is well suited to extended cellaring. Well, other bottles of that label, anyway! So what choices are there? Option One is to reseal the bottle with a clean cork and refrigerate, which slows the rate of oxidation. Just leave it long enough to warm back up to around 18 degrees Celsius if the wine is a red. This often works surprisingly well. Option Two is to pour the remaining contents into a clean 375 ml wine bottle and re-cork. You can then refrigerate this bottle to help it last even longer. Slightly labour-intensive, this is by far the best thing you can do. Bottles with screwtop caps naturally make Options One and Two easier to do. Option Three is to use a form of inert gas displacement, which excludes all oxygen from the bottle. Fashionable in the European drinks trade, I’m still unconvinced. You need to pump in an awful lot of inert gas to displace all the oxygen left in the top of a half-empty wine bottle, and I sincerely doubt that the gas cans designed to perform this feat contain enough gas to use effectively on more than a few bottles. The last choice, Option Four, is to use those imported devices which claim to create a vacuum which itself excludes oxygen, removing it from the wine, and thereby protecting it. The vacuum pump systems typically only exclude about two-thirds of the air, which therefore leaves around one-third of the initial oxygen present to further damage the wine. Also, when you operate the pump, you also draw out from the wine much of the protective sulphur dioxide added deliberately to the wine by the winemaker to protect it from oxygen. So you’re leaving a third of the oxygen, which can (and does) damage the wine, since the wine is less protected with preservative than before. You also strip out much of the wine’s carbon dioxide, which without being visibly evident, contributes to the texture and mouthfeel of unwooded whites and reds.
