Of all the questions I get asked most often, this one pops up all the time: What is the best way to preserve the remaining contents of a half-consumed bottle of wine? Let’s run through the options available.
- If you have a bit of spare cash, if you’re prepared to spend a little time in setting up the bottle, if you don’t mind a slightly fiddly pouring technique and if the wine in question is worth all this trouble then the best answer is Coravin. I’m a massive fan and I was once given one to test-drive. Test drive it I did, but I’ve barely used it since. Perhaps it’s because I don’t leave too many bottles half-empty (which is partially but not entirely true) and perhaps it’s because it’s just too finnicky for me. But from a technical perspective, it truly works. For a very long time.
- I think you can still buy other forms of inert gas displacement out of pressurised cans, which apparently exclude all oxygen from the bottle. Fashionable in the European drinks trade, I remain 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.
- Another option 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. And finally, all those delicious aromas you smell as you religiously pump away were never intended to leave the wine. They were supposed to be part of the reason you bought the bottle.
- So here’s my recommendation for most of us. Go buy a 375 ml bottle of wine sealed with a screwcap and drink it. Wash out the bottle with water and seal it closed with the screwcap. Next time you have half a bottle of wine you wish to keep, tip in the contents as far up to the top as possible and reseal. Refrigerate it if you wish to keep it even longer, but this will last for weeks.
But what happens if you just reseal your bottle of wine with the cork or screwcap? I do this all the time, returning whites to the fridge. Often reds and whites are actually better the following day, but it’s far from an ironclad certainty. There’s no doubting that wines of exceptional balance and quality will last for longer than lesser examples.
