Unifinished business , the 750ml dilemma

You open a nice bottle of wine but you can't finish it all that night. What to do?

There are a lot of ways this can happen.

• If it is just you drinking, one bottle is a lot. Especially for a weeknight.
• You open a bottle that nobody else likes but you. Now you're "responsible" for finishing that bottle.
  
• If there are several of you, say 4, you might not be able to finish that 7th bottle you open. :)
• At your normal food and wine pairing dinner at home, one wine per course leaves a lot of unfinished bottles.

The problem is oxygen. Perhaps hence the phrase, "letting the wine breathe." Oxygen is a highly reactive element and reacts with the wine. Softening the tannins at first but then slowly turning the wine into vinegar. The rule of thumb I've heard is every hour of air is like a year of bottle age, when trying to soften a tannic red. Of course, bottle aging is gentler process and lets more complex flavors develop than beating a wine with oxygen.

Reds are a lot more finicky than whites. For a while, it seemed that 95% of the reds I opened were goners the next day on the counter. In retrospect, I was buying cheap (but highly rated, of course) ready-to-drink wines that didn't have much tannins. These wines intrinsically don't have much aging potential. And sitting on the counter overnight is like fast-forwarding through a decade. In particular, the Columbia Crest reds and Australian Shirazes, were pretty much on death row once they hit nightfall.

The solutions I myself have tried are vast, if five is considered vast.

• buy the rubber stopper and the pumper that pumps air out of the bottle. The stopper does hold a seal over night, but I found that this does not work too well. I had also read that this was useless, confirming my experience. Of course I've had friends tell me that it works great. And finally, the scientist in me knows that you can pump at most 1/3 of the air with the plunger, so you've still got 2/3 of the oxygen doing its damage. Score: D
  
• buy the spray can of inert gas that you spray (cause it's a spray can) into the bottle. The idea is to have a gas heavier than air coat the surface of the wine, forming an oxygen barrier. There are different variations of the gases, but the cannisters I've tried use carbon dioxide and a bit of argon. Initially, it seemed to sort of work, but I never felt like the next day bottle was anywhere near as nice as the night before. Score: C-
• just fuggadaboutit. Leave the darn thing corked. Score: D
• get half bottles. (See below).
• and my favorite idea... just drink the whole bottle. Score: ?? (to drunk to remember)

The half bottle solution

I poured dessert wine at a Rosenblum open house one year and they came in 375 ml bottles. I asked if I could have a case of the empties and after making sure I was taking just bottles, they gave me a case.

Since the bottles sat for 2 months ignored, I had to thoroughly wash the bottles, which was no fun. (Can you say pour boiling water and let sit overnight again and again?) I finally started using them. I would open a 750ml and immediately pour wine into the half bottle to about 1/2 inch from the top. I would then cork it leaving very little if any air. (If you fill to the brim, the cork displaces the very top and you get to wipe off your hands.) I placed the filled half bottle in my pantry which was cooler and darker than the rest of kitchen.

And the verdict is... not terribly effective at all. I got one in maybe 15 bottles that tasted good the next day. What sounded so good on paper was a flop. And there was the issue of washing out the half bottle each time for reuse. Score: C

The current solution

A friend Steve, who has all sorts of unsophisticated and contradictory views on wine (likes cheap French wine, doesn't care for too fruity, enjoys the mini bottles given out on airplanes, doesn't like oaky chardonnay), said he just sticks it in the refrigerator. I of course, poopooed this moronic idea. Until I read a Wine Spectator post from one of their tasters about essentially doing the same thing. So I tried it and well it seems to work better than anything else. Score: B+