How to keep wine fresh after opening the bottle

There are many ways to keep wine fresh after opening the bottle, but some work better than others.

The Coravin wine device penetrates the cork to extract a single glass of wine.

I rarely save my unfinished bottles of wine. Few wines are as good, let alone better, on the second or third day. I’m more likely to give away half-finished bottles than I am to squirrel them away.

I realise that I’m very much in the minority. Almost everyone I know seems to have several half-drunk bottles stored on their kitchen counters or inside refrigerator doors. I don’t know if that means they’re drinking much more than I am, or much less, but it may account for the growing market for wine-preservation tools.

Vacu-Vin resealing system removes the air from an opened bottle and seals the wine with a special stopper.

There are two basic ways to keep an open bottle of wine fresh and protect it against oxidation: either the air in the bottle is pumped out or the remaining wine is covered with a protective blanket of gas. The simplest airpump system is a small plastic device that allows wine drinkers to remove air from the bottle by hand. Vacu Vin’s Wine Saver, which debuted 30 years ago, is probably the best known. The simplest — and cheapest — form of protective gas comes in a can and is sprayed directly into the bottle.

The Coravin Wine System takes wine-preservation to the next level by letting oenophiles serve wine without ever actually uncorking the bottle. The device plunges a thin needle into the bottle through a cork to remove small amounts of wine. It then fills the empty space with argon gas. The cork closes back on the hole, theoretically keeping the wine in the same state as an unopened bottle.

The Coravin, despite a 2014 recall when 13 bottles broke, has become popular with wine professionals, especially sommeliers. Some restaurants in New York feature “Coravin wines”, usually rare bottles that wouldn’t otherwise be financially feasible to sell by the glass. I’ve sampled a few and found that even though they were a couple of weeks old, they were remarkably fresh.

I’ve never used any wine-­preservation devices, but decided to conduct my own highly unscientific test. I bought a Vacu Vin Wine Saver; a bottle of Private Preserve spray, a blend of nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide; and Metrokane’s Rabbit Electric Wine Preserver, a battery-­powered device with a light that illuminates when the air is removed from the bottle.

I tested the devices with six bottles of 2012 Famille Perrin Cotes du Rhone Villages, a lively basic red. After tasting each wine to make sure it was sound, I poured half of the wine out, ensuring each bottle had the same amount left.

The first bottle I simply recorked and put into the refrigerator. I filled the second up with marbles (to displace the air) and put it in the fridge. For the third bottle, I squirted gas from the Private Preserve can as directed (“one long spray, three short sprays”), then replaced the cork. I pumped the air out of the fourth and fifth bottles — first with the Vacu Vin, then with the Rabbit — and put them in my cellar. The sixth bottle went into the freezer, since a wine-collector swore that was the best way to keep an open bottle fresh.

I waited two days before tasting the wines. The wine under the Vacu Vin tasted the freshest by far, with the liveliest aromas. The ­second-best was the wine I’d recorked and put in the fridge. The wine under the Rabbit tasted reasonably fresh but lacked aroma. I wondered if it had pulled all the volatile components out of the bottle along with the air.

The wine with the marbles tasted a bit musty. The wine under the spray tasted like cardboard. Had I sprayed the gas into the bottle for one short and three long instead of one long and three short?

On day six, I tried the three bottles that made the final cut. The Vacu Vin wine was flat and fruitless. The Rabbit wine was a bit better, but the frozen wine was flat and featureless.

The Wall Street Journal