Oh look, there's still some wine left:   What to do when you can't finish the bottle.

The grand holiday meal is behind you.  The dishes are making their way to sink and the guests are saying their good-byes.  The leftovers are of course being wrapped up - there's lots of good sandwiches to be made with that turkey carcass or half a honey-baked ham.  But what about the wine? 

The Problem

You did your sommelier thing and carefully planned the wines to match the courses.  The results were excellent.  You opened some folk's eyes to the potential of wine-food matching.  Even Uncle Bert seemed impressed.  But now you've got a half-finished bottle of Montrachet, a healthy dollop of fine Premier Cru red Burgundy, a third of a bottle of hearty cab, a great old vintage Port that's only a quarter empty and a couple glasses worth of Champagne.  You can't drink it all with your significant other while cleaning up. I know, I've tried.  And you can't bear the thought of it turning to sherry before you get to it.  So what to do?

A lot of time and effort has been put into solving the what-to-do-with-my-half-empty-wine-bottle problem and interestingly, people are just now starting to reach consensus on what works and what doesn't.  It's been known for centuries that wine exposed to air degrades quickly, with oxygen being the primary culprit.  Most preservation strategies therefore involve keeping the wine out of contact with oxygen. Let's first look at each of these.

The "Folk" Solutions

Lots of people just wing it when it comes to preserving wine.  Here's what happens:

Just leave it out - Setting the bottle to the side, wide open, gets the oxygen working on it immediately.  In a day, much of the fruit will be fading from white and light red wines.  And of course sparkling wine will be dead flat.  Heartier reds, especially young cabs, might actually taste better after a day of this treatment as the tannins start to soften.   In almost all cases the nose will be fading, though.  And watch out for critters that may have flown in to investigate that wonderful aroma. In two days, the whites will begin to be unpleasant, even the heartiest reds will have turned the corner and only that port will be doing fine.  After three days, forget even the Cabs. 

Put a cork in it - This is probably the most common strategy.  The cork is pushed back in before the bottle's stuck off to the side.  Surprisingly perhaps, this actually helps.  You're limiting the oxygen to what's in the bottle and of course you're also keeping the fruit flies out.   Doing this seems to add perhaps a half day to the life of the wine, more if the bottle's almost full.  And the nose seems to hold up better.  This is perhaps due to the volatile compounds that make up the nose having nowhere to go.  Now it's darn hard to do this with champagne.  But for the port, this may be all that's needed.

Into the fridge with it - This is what we do with the middle of the road white wines.  In goes the cork, and into the refrigerator goes the bottle.  This works because chemical reactions, including wine oxidation, take place at a much lower rate in cool/cold wine than in warm wine.   The fruit flavors hold up much better as does the nose.   Figure on this doing an acceptable job of keeping pedestrian whites for up to 2-3 days. Strangely, the jury is still out on whether chilling red wines slows degradation or not.  While common sense says it should, there is some evidence that for some reason, this actually increases the uptake of oxygen and speeds decline. Another down side to this is that there's never enough room in our fridge, and tall wine bottles are remarkably hard to find a spot for where they can stand upright.  Laying them down invites leakage.

The Commercial Solutions

A lot of products are on the market that claim to help you preserve wine.  Folks that have done objective testing, including double-blind tasting of the resultant wines, have remarkably similar experiences to share.   Some of these work, and some fail alarmingly. 

Wine For Later, Mezzo Wine Saver and similar products - This is a set of  one or more glass carafes with stoppers that are smaller than regular wine bottles.  You pour your wine in up to the very top and close it.  Since there's no room for air, there can't be any oxygen, goes the theory.  And it holds up under scrutiny, at least to a point.   Wines tend to oxidize more slowly than with an open bottle and they hold their aroma pretty well.  It's not perfect because there's some oxygen dissolved in the wine, and the stopper is not absolutely air-tight. But this is a "pretty good" storage method.  The bottles look nice and the wine keeps most of its qualities for several days.  Best of all, there's nothing more to buy once you've invested in the carafe.  Of course this only works if you have exactly enough wine to fill the carafe to the top. If you like this concept, you can make a free set of these by saving an old 375 ml "half bottle" and a 175 ml "split". You'll need a funnel too.

VacuVin - This product consists of a set of special stoppers with valves in them and a hand pump which pulls the air out, creating a vacuum.  The theory is that since there's no air left in the bottle, there can't be any oxygen.   We used this system religiously for years, and still have a full set if you'd like it cheap.  It doesn't work for several reasons.  First, the vacuum is only partial.  A little hand pump is not going to get all the air out, and the stoppers leak.  So there's still oxygen to degrade the wine.  What's worse, the low vapor pressure of the vacuum causes the volatile compounds in the wine to evaporate.  The nose disappears almost immediately.  This has been backed up in numerous blind tastings.  Wines stored using the VacuVin have been termed flat and odorless when tasted blind after even a day of storage.  While they oxidize more slowly than open bottles, they oxidize more quickly than those stored using the other commercial methods indicated above.  So if you've got one of these things, toss it.   Sorry.

Private Preserve - This is a spray can full of a heavier-than-air mixture of inert gases - carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon in a finely-tuned (and secret) ratio.  When sprayed into a partially full bottle of wine, which is then sealed, it displaces the corrosive oxygen.  The vapor pressure stays high so the aroma is preserved and yet oxygen dissolved in the wine can escape and is then be diluted by the inert gas.  The carbon dioxide content even helps sparkling wines retain their fizz.  Tests indicate that the fruit and nose character can hold up for weeks (some users even claim months!) while hard tannins actually soften.  This has been verified in so many blind tastings - beating all other methods - that we strongly recommend this product, and now stock it in our Wine Shop Serving Accessory section.  While the can feels empty, it actually has enough gas for 100+ bottles, so your cost is under 10 cents per use.  By the way, this even works for beer!

Vintage Keeper - This is a larger can of gas,  half-and-half nitrogen and carbon dioxide in this case, along with a beer-tap type closure for the bottle that lets you pour wine without opening.  There are various setups, including a multiple server that looks like a mini wine bar.  The theory is the same as Private Preserve - displace oxygen with neutral gas - with the added advantage of no-hassle access to your wine.  This works similarly to commercial "cruvinets" you see at upscale restaurants and wine bars that serve fine wine by the glass.  I just bought one of these at a charity wine auction along with 10 bottles of wine.  My winning bid was so low, I feel like I got the Vintage Keeper for free.  Maybe I got my money's worth. 

For some reason, blind tastings have shown this solution much inferior to Private Preserve.   Unpleasant volatile characteristics appear on the nose, fruit characteristics deteriorate and sharp tannin qualities increase.  How could this happen?  One theory goes that the plastic tubing and stopper cause these problems.  Others claim that there is too great a percent of carbon dioxide which dissolves into the wine creating carbonic acid - thus increasing the acidity and perceived tannins.   Perhaps also, there is too high a concentration of nitrogen, which is lighter than argon, which allows the lighter volatiles to escape. Finally, neither carbon dioxide nor nitrogen is entirely inert.  Both may still allow the decline of the fruit characteristics.  Combine this with the plastic tubing which is in full contact with the wine and a possibly leaky stopper, and you have the worst of all worlds.  By the way, it's the most expensive of the solutions.   My reasoning may be faulty, but when I see several independent double blind tastings confirming this, I have a very healthy skepticism for this solution.  I'll try mine and let you know.

Other problems

Even the best of these solutions has problems.   One is sparkling wine.  If we have several left-over bottles, we always consume the sparkling wine first.  This is for obvious reasons. Even if we can preserve the fruit and nose, and prevent oxidation, and pump in some auxiliary carbon dioxide, the effervescence quickly disappears and we're left with mediocre (at best) still wine.  There are great Champagne stoppers (we sell one  in our Wine Shop) but frankly, none work well when the bottle's almost empty.  There's only one solution here: Drink up. 

And what if you're a one-glass-a-night or weekend-only wine drinker?   How do you preserve the wine so it stays fresh for quite a few days, through multiple openings?  And what about that old, delicate Lafite-Rothschild that's spectacular when opened but will fall apart like a house of cards in hours after opening?

Well folks are still working on this.  Until a proven solution is determined, I'm happy to present a theoretical solution, utilizing the best of tested reality and substantiated theory.

The Ideal Solution

The mixed-gas-without-plastic solution presented by Private Preserve is the clear tested winner for preserving all that's good in wine.  But  it's only as good as the stopper that's used.   Furthermore, it cannot completely stop the oxidation that starts the moment wine first makes contact with the air.

The solution to the first problem is obvious - get a good, air tight stopper.  The best one we've found is SpiritStopper.   It forms a solid positive air-tight seal, that keeps air out and, as is important to preserve aromas characteristics and carbonation in Champagne, wine off-gas in. Look for it in our Wine Shop Serving Accessory  section next to Private Preserve.

The solution to the second problem, inevitable chemical deterioration, is one we've been talking about for several months - cold temperatures.  Remember the Arrhenius equation?  It says that the rate of chemical reactions roughly halves for every 18 degrees F that temperature declines.  Move that bottle of wine from your 72 degree kitchen into your 36 degree refrigerator and it will last 4 times as long, all else being equal.  I still believe in this for red as well as white wines, but I could be convinced otherwise.  Until I am, here's the

Ultimate Parker wine storage solution:

If the wine's a sparkler and the bottle's more than half empty, drink up.
If the wine's a Port, pump some Private Preserve into it and replace the cork.  Store at room temperature

Otherwise:
Pump a healthy shot of Private Preserve into the bottle (one long spritz and 4 short ones)
Insert a good, air tight stopper like SpiritStopper
Place the bottle in the refrigerator
If the wine is a red, take it out and let it sit at room temperature for an  hour or so before serving.

We intend to perform a double blind taste test on this method compared to all others.  We'll let you know what we find out.  If you've done any similar tests, we welcome your findings.

Over the next few months, we'll discuss formal wine cellar alternatives.  We'll also talk about that great  fear - shipping wine (We at Brentwood Wine Company have this one pretty well in hand)

Do you have any questions or comments on storing or taking care of wine?  E-Mail us at dave@brentwoodwine.com.

May all your wines be properly stored,

Dave

To read back issues of Storing Wine, click on the title below:

Honey, I'd like the Guestroom Back, or What to do with all that Wine 

The Wine Cellar: Fact and Fiction