Wine Tip #3 – Storing Opened Wine

Stop Pouring Your Money Down The Drain!

If you are like me, I can’t throw down an entire bottle of my favorite red by myself and more than likely, I always have left overs. When I first started drinking wine a few years back, I would just put the cork back in the wine and leave it on the counter for a few days. Hell, I didn’t even know what bad wine tasted like because I thought all wine tasted bad. Eventually I moved out of the trailer park and  made some more sophisticated friends who taught me a thing or two about wine. From there, I bought some of those decorative corks, replacing the cork itself, but didn’t realize that was really ineffective too ( my corks were those stainless steel with crystals, really pretty indeed). It wasn’t until I understood the whole air/oxygen/spoilage thing.

It wasn’t until about three years ago that I was introduced to the proper way to store my unused wine. It pains me to think of all the wine I wasted in those years due to my ignorance. Ah, the shame of it all.

There are several ways to store your unused wine, keep the flavor and enjoy the entire bottle instead of pouring it down the drain along with your hard earned money.

Depending on how much wine you have left over, this tip allows you to be true to the environment and recycle some of your glass bottles: use your left over glass bottles. I use my Kombucha bottles, but Perrier, and Ice Tea glass bottles work just as well. Note: DO NOT use plastic. If you have enough wine to fill the glass bottle up to the top, simply pour, screw the cap on tight and refrigerate.

This tip is for those of us who are a little heavier drinkers. If you don’t have enough wine to fill your entire glass bottle, purchase a wine vacuum which simply sucks the air out of the wine bottle. This little gadget save you a lot of money and guilt. As you know, it is important to get the air out of the bottle to avoid oxidation or the wine becoming oxidized. Again, once you remove the air from the bottle, refrigerate.

You don’t want to store wine in a decanter. Decanters are made to allow wine to breathe, not to store.

Lastly, if you follow these simple tips, a red wine that has been recorked and refrigerated will keep for about three days. A white or rose wine will keep for about two days. Plenty of time to finish her off! I now use my stainless steel stoppers for decoration and they are pretty!

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Oxidation is when a wine is spoiled due to faulty corks or if the wine has been left open for some time, the wine will taste off.

Oxidized in this post simply describes a wine which, after being exposed to oxygen because it was left open for several hours or more, has lost its freshness and has become stale. You can get a sense of what this taste likes by leaving a glass of wine out overnight to experience this taste.