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There are plenty of tips for storing and aging bottles of wine to be found online, but much less advice about handling an opened bottle that you haven’t finished. Although you can store open wine, it has a shelf life of just a few days. Not to mention that storing a small amount of wine in its original bottle isn’t ideal. While there are neat little systems meant for preserving opened bottles — like the Vacu Vin Original Wine Saver – sometimes it’s nice not having to buy a single-use tool. Warner Boin Dowlearn, self-proclaimed as the “Snob-Free Somm”, shared on TikTok that the best way to store leftover wine is to utilize something you already have at home, like a mason jar.
Dowlearn’s first piece of advice for storing wine tackles one of the biggest mistakes everyone makes with leftover wine: resealing with bottle with its original cork. Since corks are naturally porous, they let oxygen seep into the wine bottle, along with any smells that might be lingering in your refrigerator, which can adversely affect the taste of the wine. While your spicy beef stir fry leftovers may be great for lunch the next day, the last thing you want are those pungent flavors creeping into your crisp white wine. Keeping wine in a mason jar instantly solves this problem.
Mason jars are the perfect vessels for storing wine
Similar to the inside of an avocado or the flesh of an apple browning when exposed to air, exposure to oxygen is not good for an opened bottle of wine. While controlled oxidation may be a part of winemaking, it’s not something that wine drinkers should be attempting at home as it can prompt degradation.
“What you really want to do is reduce the amount of oxygen-to-wine ratio,” explains Dowlearn in her TikTok. To do this, she recommends transferring wine into an airtight container like a mason jar. The key is to select the proper size to reduce the amount of oxygen inside the container. Ideally, you want a jar that’s small enough to fit your leftover wine almost all the way up to the brim to limit the risk of oxidation. Dowlearn shares that she once even cleaned out a kombucha bottle to store leftover wine. Just be sure that any jars or containers are clean and dry before using.
A bonus to storing leftover wine in a mason jar is that (if you’re so inclined) you can drink the wine straight out of the container when you’re ready to enjoy it again. This would probably go against the advice of many sommeliers as the right stemware can bring out the best in a wine. But, it would also mean that you don’t have to worry about washing a delicate wine glass, afterward!
