Seems everywhere you turn these days, you read about the benefits of drinking a glass of wine or two a day. But assuming the standard four to six ounces per glass, how do you keep the other four to five glasses still in the bottle fresh once you’ve had your daily dose?
Back in college, assuming any wine was actually left in the bottle, we’d just try to jam the cork back in the bottle—assuming the “cork” wasn’t actually a screw cap. The only problem was that, once released from the bottle, the cork would often expand, making getting it back in the bottle neck an often futile [or at the very least, inelegant] exercise.
Crate and Barrel offers some decidedly more stylish solutions. The Botanical Bottle Stopper features what their website calls a “graphic, dimensional frond of deep-sea flora.” The colorful Cosmic Bottle Stoppers, available in purple, red, green, teal and orange, top your wine bottles with high-gloss “cosmic color” spheres. Both designs are made of zinc alloy with rubber stoppers. The rubber stoppers not only form a nice tight seal to help extend the life of the wine—they solve a problem we’d been noticing with our older, mostly metal stoppers. The metal tips that fit inside the bottle were becoming corroded. And if the metal was reacting with the wine, didn’t that mean the wine was reacting with the metal?
Sure, you can spend lots more for high tech wine stoppers that remove air from the bottle to essentially reseal it and keep the wine drinkable for much longer. But to me, if you need one of those, the problem isn’t the technology of these simpler stoppers—it’s that you’re not drinking enough wine.
You’ll find the Botanical Bottle Stopper and Cosmic Bottle Stoppers in Crate and Barrel stores and on their website for $4.95 each.
Left overs ?
Egad..what a concept.
I think I see a new item for the holiday shopping list.
Thanks
Usually artificial corks are impossible to get back into the wine bottle, and sometimes even actual cork because of expansion. I use a plastic and cork base stopper from Port bottles which fits just right. Also in liter bottles from local vinyards many have gone to screw caps and these function well to reclose a bottle. Rarely have a problem with aging or spoilage, as the wine is consumed in 2 or 3 days.
Yeah, Aunty Pol, allegedly if you drink more than two glasses a day, the health benefits go away. Tragically. And yes, these would make great stocking stuffers.
Helmut—You bring up an interesting point. Wines corked with beloved traditional corks are somewhat subject to cork taint, in which wines can take on an unpleasant smell or even spoil. Plastic corks seal more completely and largely eliminate the problem. But they’re also a bear to remove from the bottle sometimes and forget ever getting them back in. Screw caps, once relegated to jug wine, are now seeing use by respected wineries for high end wines. The problem with screw caps is that they seal too well—wine is a living thing that needs to breathe a little. For short-term storage, screw caps are great, but for wine you want to set aside for a few years, they’re not so good. Winemakers are trying to come up with screw caps that let the wine breathe just a little to solve this problem.
We always use a Vacuvin (vacuum wine saver), a handy little pump with re-usable stoppers. It works by pulling the excess air out of the bottle thus keeping the wine much fresher than simply pushing in a stopper. It was highly recommended to us by friends and we always take it on holiday to France. The wine lasts for several days if you don’t get round to drinking it sooner, but it is worth using even if you are finishing the bottle later in the day as wine can deteriorate so quickly. They are easily available. We bought our pump and additional stoppers on Amazon.
hopeeternal—I suppose one day I should invest in a Vacu Vin one of these. Although I must say, unless a bottle has already turned when we open it, we seem to go through it quickly enough for our low-tech stoppers to do the job.