How to preserve or use leftover wine

As a member of the “empty bottle” club, leftover wine is rarely an issue in our household. However, there are times that a nice bottle goes unfinished and half (or more or less) of the bottle needs to be preserved for another time or put to use elsewhere.

If it’s a wine you want to save, there are a few ways to go about it. One of the most successful is one you may have not yet tried. Pour the remaining wine into a smaller container, such as a plastic or glass water bottle and seal it. Then place it in the fridge (even if the wine is red). The less oxygen/surface area ratio as well as the cooler temperature will help preserve the wine. If it is red, just take it out of the fridge an hour or so before planned consumption. The second option is the wine preserver spray, Private  Preserve, a container filled with inert, safe gas that, when sprayed into the wine bottle, blankets the wine and protects it from oxygen, the evil gas that can lead to a wine’s ruin. Just spray and re-cork and stick it in the fridge. Finally, there is the Vacuvin Vacuum wine saver. Though not the most effective, it is probably the most popular. This device sucks all the oxygen out of the bottle (or tries to) in order to protect the juice from ruin. If you do use this option, do stick it in the fridge for best results.

Sometimes a wine not only tastes different the next day (or two days later), it tastes downright bad. This is because oxygen, which can benefit a wine in small doses, is the element that puts wine on the path to becoming vinegar.  A wine starts to oxidize the minute it sees oxygen and the transformation can be quick or slow, depending on the wine.  Luckily, there are a couple of other ways to re-use this wine, other than pouring it down the drain.

– Make a marinade – While you can buy wine made for cooking, it’s usually best to use a wine that you’d actually drink. Most wine recipes cook-down a wine until the alcohol is gone and the flavors are concentrated, which is a perfect fit for leftover wine. Here are some great recipes from Real Simple magazine for using leftover wine.

– Turn it to vinegar – Though wine naturally, eventually turns to vinegar, it is a long process. The process can be sped up using a bacteria called “mother of vinegar,” which can be found at some random hardware or wine equipment stores. When you add “mother” to the old wine, it helps to speed up the process of vinegar transformation. After it’s done, you discard the “mother” and strain the vinegar. You can read a first hand account of how this works here.

If you’re not in the empty bottle club yet, hope you try one of the above suggestions to preserve or put your leftover wine to good use. Cheers!