After an article I wrote on breathing wine I received a letter asking how long a wine can last once open, before it begins to deteriorate. As you may have guessed, the answer isn’t entirely straightforward. Fuller-bodied wines will last while open for longer than more delicate styles, and wines of exceptional balance and quality will undoubtedly last for longer than lesser examples. I’ve seen proof of that often enough when on the morning after a real night before I come to clean up the mess on the table and still find the occasional (but rare) bottle of uncorked and unsealed wine still standing on the table and perfectly intact. Better-quality wines always stand more chance of being sound enough for lunch the next day, while inferior examples don’t even make the fish and chips. However there are some red wines made in what might loosely be described as the ‘traditional Australian style’ that I prefer to drink several days after opening. I uncork, spill a little down the sink to increase the surface-area open near the top, push the cork back and leave. Without wishing to offend any wine company in particular, let me say that the older wineries using older Australian techniques are the more suitable for this potentially rude sort of treatment. The wines themselves usually show a little reduced sulphur, volatility and other types of pong on opening and the time these little farmyard scents are given to dissipate usually does them the power of good. There is a rather heated debate going on in wine circles as to the best means of keeping wine in the bottle once opened. Option One is undoubtedly to keep the remaining contents in your stomach, but I grant that isn’t always possible or appropriate. Option Two is to use a form of inert gas displacement, which excludes all oxygen from the bottle. Option Three is to reseal with a clean cork and refrigerate the bottle. Just leave it long enough to warm back up nearly to room temperature before drinking if the wine is a red. Option Four is to pour the remaining contents into a half-bottle and re-cork. This option is a sound development of Option Three if only a small quantity remains. The last and less preferable choice, Option Five, 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. To the people who have come out in strong public support of this system I ask the following questions. (i) I can prove that the system only excludes about two-thirds of the air, which therefore leaves around one-third of the initial oxygen present to further damage the wine. Will this affect the wine? (ii) When you operate the pump that comes with these devices 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 any oxygen the wine may encounter. Oxygen is clearly left in the bottle after pumping to maximum ‘vacuum’ as question (i) points out. Will the removal of this SO2 have any detrimental effect? (iii) It is apparent whenever these pumps are used that flavours are being lost from the wine, for you can quite clearly smell the wine’s aromas leaving the bottle. These volatile flavours, which are what the winemaker has spent up to the previous three years trying to harness and balance, go straight out and into the atmosphere. Could this possibly harm the wine or contribute to any detectable loss of flavour? I am keen to hear a response by any of the winemakers or well-known wine writers, both Australian and European, who have given such unequivocal support to these apparently remarkable devices. Until then I will choose Options One to Four as detailed, every time.
