11 May How to Keep Your Wine Fresh After Opening

Storing Open Wine Bottles

On this page, we’re going to share how you can keep your wine fresh after opening. 

If you’re a wine lover, you most likely understand the importance of good tasting wine. Nothing dulls the taste buds like a bad-tasting wine, and because wine enthusiasts look forward to happy moments with a glass of quality wine, they try to make sure that they get nothing short of the proverbial happiness in every glass. 

Many reasons, biological, and otherwise may contribute to bad tasting wine. Such stale tastes could emanate from a poor brewing process, use of low-quality ingredients, poor storage, and yes, lack of freshness among other things. 

While it is true that old wine is the best wine, this theory only holds true when the wine bottle remains sealed and properly stored. Once the bottle of wine becomes opened, it’s usually best to make sure it finishes as soon as possible to get the best out of it. This is because when wine mixes with air, oxidation takes place, and this interferes with the quality of the wine, and the freshness too.

We cannot, however, be expected to keep up with the ‘finish a bottle of wine in a day’ rule as situations may arise that necessitate our having to keep the wine long after it has been opened. In such situations, the question becomes, is it possible to keep your time fresh after opening? The good news is that you can if you follow the techniques in this article. 

Ways to Keep Your Wine Fresh After Opening 

Now that you understand the importance of fresh wine, how do you make sure that your bottle of wine doesn’t lose its freshness after it has been opened? There are many tips available on how to store and preserve opened wine. Here are some of them:

• Put in a refrigerator; One of the best, easiest, and most common ways of preserving food so that it retains its freshness is by refrigerating it. Refrigerating wine as soon as it is open helps to slow down the oxidation process, keeping it fresher for a longer period than if it wasn’t refrigerated. 

However, the temperature of the refrigerator shouldn’t be too low though. A temperature of around 55 degrees is just perfect.

• Use Wine Stoppers; To prevent the wine from oxidation, it’s important for you to cover it with its cork soon after it is open. When you can’t find the wine cork or if you’re experiencing some difficulty fitting the wine cork into the bottle, you can simply get a wine stopper to perform the same function. Wine stoppers come in colorful variants and help to lock air out of the wine bottle. This prevents oxidation and guarantees its freshness.
• Make use of a wine shield; To preserve your opened wine for a couple of days, you can get a wine shield. A wine shield is a disc-like material placed inside an unfinished bottle of wine. It’s lightweight so it floats inside the bottle, and does the job of keeping the wine fresh.
• Use a Vacuum Pump; Oxygen is the fuel that drives the wheels of oxidation. Oxidation cannot take place without oxygen; this is why the vacuum pump helps keep the wine fresh by sucking out the oxygen from an opened wine bottle.
• Store in Dim Light; Wines and light do not have the best of relationships. This is because asides from oxygen, light is another factor that helps speed up the oxidation process. To avoid this, always make sure that your wine is stored in dark places away from sunlight. You can obtain specialized light-blocking cellars from Papro Wine Cellars & Consulting at affordable rates.
• Make use of Half Bottles; When you’ve drunk wine up to half its content, it means that the wine bottle is half-empty, thereby providing room for oxygen to begin the oxidation process. To avoid this, you can pour the remaining wine content into a smaller bottle that it fills up. This leaves little room for oxygen to enter.
• Use an Inert Gas. There are some kinds of gases that are non-reactive. Inert gases represent a category of such gases. When you pump a non-reactive inert gas into your unfinished wine bottle, it feels up the space in the bottle and acts as a protective shield against other gases like oxygen. Once you fill your wine bottle up with inert gas, seal tightly with a cork or wine stopper, and place it in a standing position inside a refrigerator.

Why You Should Keep Your Wine Fresh 

There are so many reasons why it’s important to keep your bottle of wine fresh even after opening. Here are some:

 

• Great Taste: There’s a particularly wonderful taste you get from drinking fresh wine. Fresh wine gives a refreshing taste which is characteristic of freshly squeezed fruits, has a wonderful finish, and a great aroma too. 

 

Fresh wine is balanced and has just the perfect acidity perception. To make sure that your wine continues to taste great, and possess the finesse of good quality wine, it’s important that you keep your wines fresh, especially after opening.

• Health: When wine is open and no efforts are made to keep it fresh, it becomes oxidized due to exposure to oxygen and light. This exposure not only tampers with the taste, aroma, and appearance, it also affects the quality of the nutrients in the wine, thereby diminishing the nutritional value and other associated health benefits. Wine may even become so exposed that it becomes poisonous.
• Quality: When a bottle of wine remains fresh, its composition at the time remains intact and of premium quality. Exposure to air and light makes it lose some of its most essential qualities. Its freshness is gone, and it’s quality too. If you want to make sure that the quality of your wine isn’t tempered, make sure it retains its freshness.
• Better Appreciation and Cost-Effectiveness: The more time a bottle of wine remains fresh after opening, the better you appreciate it. If it gets bad and loses its freshness and taste, you probably will throw it in the trash. 

 

• Taste and Class: Good quality, fresh-tasting wine does a lot to show people how much taste and class you have. Serving guests a bottle of wine that doesn’t taste fresh gives them a rather poor impression of you. 

 

Do you need a proper wine cellar for your wine collections in a bid to maintain wine freshness, and project an allure of tasteful furnishing, feel free to contact Papro Wine Cellars & Consulting today.