How to preserve wine?

It`s a question you may have asked yourself after having opened a bottle of wine and not being sure if you want to finish it. There`re several methods to store a bottle of wine after you`ve opened it.

Best low budget wine preserver

The cheapest wine preservation system is to re-cork a wine bottle, but it has a very limited efficiency as there`ll be remaining oxygen in the bottle.  Other methods are preservation systems which allow you to remove part of the oxygen atmosphere from the wine bottle. Commercially available products which help you to do this are the Vacu Vin™, Rabbit™ or Houdini™ wine preserver. With theses systems you put a rubber stopper in the wine bottle and evacuate part of the oxygen.

Based on our experience you can preserve wine for 2-3 days but not much longer as air slowly gets into the bottle. The allure of this method is that you keep the wine in the bottle, but you still need to consume it within a short period of time.

Best mid budget wine preserver

Wine preservation systems which are more expensive use a glass or plastic wine carafe with a floating stopper to prevent further contact with air. It`s a nice way of presenting your wine in a carafe but you still have the initial contact when you decant the wine into the carafe. These systems seem to work rather well to preserve your wine for a couple of days or a week. A good example is the Savino™ wine saver. The Savino™ wine saver allows you to take your wine with you. A nice addition to your wine saver would be plastic glasses to take on your trip.

A different technique is used by the Winaro™ system where you open the wine bottle and replace the atmosphere in the bottle by argon. You still must close the wine bottle with the cork or a plastic stopper. This will allow you to store your wine unoxidized for a week or two.

Best wine preserver money can buy

The best wine preservation system money can buy are the different products offered by Coravin™. The Coravin Timeless™ replaces the atmosphere in the wine bottle with argon and allows to pour the wine without removing the cork. The slightly lower priced Coravin Pivot™ system is working on the same principle but uses rubber stoppers which you need to replace the cork with.

How to preserve champagne ?

Preserving champagne or sparkling wine is more difficult than red, white or rose wine due to the carbon dioxide you need to keep in the sparkling wine to keep it`s fresh taste. Re-corking the bottle is not an option due to the special cork form which is used for sparkling wine bottles.

There`re a few commercially available stoppers with rubber seals to keep the sparkling wine bottle closed but not all are able to do this job properly for more than a few hours. A stopper we really liked is the le Creuset™ Champagne stopper. It`s a little more expensive than other stoppers but it`s able to keep the champagne bottle closed without losing too much carbon dioxide for a week.

Coravin™ has a special solution in place for champagne and sparkling wines. Coravin Sparkling™ provides you with a stopper system to close champagne bottles and to re-pressurize them. This allows you to enjoy the last glass of your champagne bottle as the first for up to 4 weeks. The Coravin™ wine preservation systems are often used by winebars to be able to offer high priced wine by the glass. The best way to store bottles which were opened by the Coravin system is a wine fridge.

Summarizing…….

Wines are easy to preserve once you`ve opened them for a few days using low to mid-price methods which prevent oxidation of the wine by air. Sparkling wines require more sophisticated methods to keep the carbon dioxide in the sparkling wine.

In the end it depends on you if you enjoy your wine or sparkling wine by the glass or with some friends to finish the bottle. Enjoy your glass of wine !

ChristinaDay
Hi, my name is Christina Day, and I am a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur. It is my favorite alcoholic drink, and I enjoy nothing better than kicking back on the sofa after a long week of work to enjoy a glass of wine… or two!

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