Do you ever wonder what to do with your leftover wine? (Or is leftover wine an oxymoron in your house?)
According to the Waste & Resource Action Programme, British households are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wine down the drain every year. One can only imagine how much wine Americans are wasting.
Is this as common a scenario in your house as it is in mine?–You’d like a glass of wine with dinner, say, but your spouse (or partner, whoever) doesn’t, or perhaps you live alone and don’t really want to finish a bottle by yourself.
Halfway through one glass, or two, you feel sufficiently sated. So what do you do with the rest? Do you A) Pour it down the drain, B) Let it sit on the counter all night because you feel too guilty to waste good wine, then throw it down the drain the next day, or C) Pour the wine back in the bottle, where it sits until you feel like having another glass of wine a week later, at which time it has turned to vinegar.
It’s a perennial question–what to do with leftover wine…
Preserving your wine not only helps your budget, but it also helps reduce your carbon footprint. Though some wines last longer than others (a big cabernet will last longer than a young red, for example; and dessert wines such as port can last for a year), all wines will last at least a day if you recork them and put them back in the fridge. Most wines will go three days.
So what else can you do? Here are some answers:
* Freeze it in ice cube trays and use it in sauces and casseroles. But don’t drink the defrosted wine–yuck!
* If you know you can’t drink a full bottle when you open it, decant half into a smaller container as soon as you open the bottle, then seal with a screw cap to keep oxygen out. Keep a few half bottles around for this purpose. Wash, and reuse. The wine should be fine for at least a week, if not longer.
* If you want to keep the leftover wine in the original bottle, you can cork it up as soon as you’re finished and keep it in the refrigerator for two or three nights. (When you take a red out of the fridge, let it warm at room temperature for ten minutes before drinking).
* Make mulled wine syrup to drizzle over ice cream, or other desserts.
Some additional tips:
* Don’t worry about week-old wine being unsafe to drink. You’ll know if you’ve kept your wine too long because it won’t taste or smell as good, but it won’t hurt you.
* The more wine you leave in the bottle, the longer it lasts. A bottle with a few inches of wine has more air and oxidizes faster.
And one last tip:
* If you didn’t like the wine the first day, you probably won’t like it the second day, either, and it won’t taste good in your soup or stew. Pour it out!
What do you do with your leftover wine? And then there are the corks….
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I never have leftover wine but my friends that do use it to make wine vinegar.
http://www.gangofpour.com/diversions/vinegar/vinegar1.html
I use an inexpensive rubber wine stopper and a plastic pump. Pump the air out of the bottle and it can stay in a wine refrigerator for days. Daily pumping helps also.