Half-measure helps save leftover wine

A few tricks to conserving —for a bit — what doesn’t get consumed right away

I was doing a wine-tasting recently and was asked several times how to store leftover wine.

It’s funny how often that question is prefaced by something like, “Not that there’s ever wine left over in our house, but ...” Obviously, there is, whether it’s wine not drunk from the first or the second bottle.

Of course you can save leftover wine for drinking another day, but there are limits. Most wine starts to degrade soon after it’s opened. You can protect it for a while, but only a while, just as you can protect half a lemon or apple for a while by shrinkwrapping it.

As for wine, whether it’s white or red, it lasts longer when the bottle is sealed and in the fridge rather than on your kitchen counter. (Just take red wine out of the fridge 30 minutes before you want to drink it, so that it will warm up, and take white wine out 15 minutes before, as fridge-temperature white wine is too cold.)

I quite often have bottles partially full of wine, and I generally put the cork back in or screw the top back on, and put the bottle in the fridge. That generally works for a day or two, but after that I can generally detect a loss of the original aromas and flavours. That’s the effect of the air in a partially full bottle.

One way to minimize exposure to air is to pour your half a bottle of wine into an actual half-bottle — a 375-mL bottle, as distinct from the standard 750-mL size. If you’re lucky enough to have just half your original bottle of wine left, it will fill the half-bottle and leave no (or virtually no) air to spoil the wine. If you often have half a bottle left over, think about buying a half-bottle of wine sometime — one with a screw cap, easier to reuse than a cork.

How long will wine last in these conditions? It depends, but I wouldn’t push it. If you drink once a week, and you go through only half a bottle, you should buy wine in the half-bottle size. It limits choice but ensures you have wine in good condition each time. Otherwise, it’s fine to keep wine in the fridge two or three days, but longer is a risk.

There are dozens of gadgets on the market that claim to protect your wine. Some create a vacuum by drawing the air out of the halffull bottle, others provide a layer of gas on top of the wine to protect it from air. Others are more complicated. I’ll review them in a future column.

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