Wine stopper usage?

June 12, 2013 2:52 PM

How much should I let my wine breathe and how much should I use a wine stopper?

I have a wine stopper thingy with a pump on it that sucks out the air and leaves a vacuum (or something close to it). Reason being is when I buy a bottle I sometimes just have a random glass here or there and need it to last a week or so without going stringent/vinegary. This little stopper is very simple, about five bucks, not one of those fancy nitrogen capsule things.

How diligent do I need to be with this stopper? Should I pretend the wine is like a carbonated drink and stopper it and vacuum seal it after every pour? Or do I need to let the wine breathe? Is the breathing necessary only after first opening it?

posted by zardoz to Food & Drink (16 answers total)

Best answer: I use a vacuum pump with my (red) wine too. I let it breathe for about 20 minutes to a half hour before first pour, then vacuum seal, and vacuum seal for all pours thereafter. In short, yes, the breathing is only necessary after the wine is first opened.

Your wine is still not going to last much more than 5 days with a vacuum seal, FYI.
posted by bearwife at 2:55 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you passively let it breathe, 20-30 minutes may be necessary (don't know), but if you actively do it, such as with this product (no special endorsement other than my roommate owns it, so I can speak to its function), you can aerate as fast as you pour. Red wines do noticeably seem to pop! in flavor. Whites, it's not really worth the effort, AFAICT.

bearwife is correct that wine will still lose its freshness after a few days, even without oxidation. Wild yeasts (and possibly some lactobacteria) will start to invade, and both can grow anaerobically.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:08 PM on June 12, 2013

You can always aerate the wine in the glass, but you can't un-aerate a wine that has begun to go bad. So I'd say, pump after every pour, if you think there'll be wine left over. Certainly pump immediately after your meal. I find that young red wines will typically keep a few days this way, even at room temperature, even with lots of headroom in the bottle.

If you're drinking an older and/or more expensive wine, and know you won't finish it by, say, tomorrow, I recommend decanting 1/2 of it immediately upon opening into a clean half-bottle, and pumping that down. This also works for young wines you want to keep for more than a few days.

Also, the rubber stoppers tend to lose their ability to hold the vacuum after a while. If you notice the next day that there's no whoosh when you open the bottle, get some new stoppers (you can buy extra stoppers without the pump).
posted by mr vino at 3:27 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

As you don't want to drink the entire bottle all at once, there's some tiptoeing to be done around the breathing:
You let the part of the wine breathe that gets into your glass - like, inside your glass.
You vacuum-stopper the rest of the wine so it keeps.

Also, how much breathing/decanting/venturi-ing is needed depends totally on the wine. Some can't handle too much oxygen very well at all, others absolutely need it.
posted by Namlit at 3:28 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Reason being is when I buy a bottle I sometimes just have a random glass here or there and need it to last a week or so without going stringent/vinegary.

IMHO, the best way to solve this problem is by drinking wine that comes in a box, which:
- Is more economical
- Prevents oxygenation of the wine because the bag just shrinks, rather than letting air into a bottle
- Makes a whole lot more sense in 2013 than stripping bark from cork oaks and manufacturing and shipping heavy glass bottles all over the world
- Does the tiniest bit to let some of the preciousness out of wine.

They sell perfectly good everyday wines in boxes these days.
posted by jeb at 3:49 PM on June 12, 2013 [3 favorites]

I got a vacuum pump stopper as well.
When I crack open a bottle I usually pour the entire contents through a fine sieve into a (very clean) blender. I then blend for ~1 minute and while the foam settles I rinse the bottle to get any remaining sediments out. Then I pour the wine back in, put the stopper in and pump.

I now have perfectly aerated wine for the next few days. But even vacuum sealing isn't going to prevent it from becoming less nice after a few days. Maybe the method where you inject an inert gas works better? Haven't tried that yet.

(Side note: the blender method held up with even the snobbiest of my wine-drinking friends in blind tastings where we had freshly poured next to traditionally decanted next to aerator aerated next to brute force blended. In fact it won out even! It's feels like I'm brutalizing the wine but it's fast and efficient.)
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:02 PM on June 12, 2013

I'm with jeb. If you want wine to last more than a few days without a lot of quality degradation then you need to buy boxed wine. Its far cheaper than bottled and you can spend the savings on buying better quality boxed wine which is quite drinkable.
posted by mmascolino at 4:45 PM on June 12, 2013

better quality boxed wine which is quite drinkable.

Any recommendations? The best boxed wine I've had so far is Target's boxed reds, which are pretty reliably good. Would love some "better quality" recommendations.
posted by arnicae at 5:54 PM on June 12, 2013

I seem to be very sensitive to the taste of oxidation in red wines. As a result, box ("cask") wines work better for me than bottled for the "having a glass of vin ordinaire with dinner" kind of wine drinking. (If we have a bottle of something nice, we try to plan things so we can finish it the day we open it.)
posted by Lexica at 6:32 PM on June 12, 2013

Any recommendations? The best boxed wine I've had so far is Target's boxed reds, which are pretty reliably good. Would love some "better quality" recommendations.

I am a huge fan of Black Box wine. I honestly have never had any other boxed wine and admittedly know just enough about wine to be dangerous to myself, but it's always a hit with friends.
posted by InsanePenguin at 7:48 PM on June 12, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for your answers, lots of great info here! Favoriting everyone looks a little OCD, so I'll just let this comment suffice.
posted by zardoz at 8:19 PM on June 12, 2013

I think it depends what you're drinking.

I mean, if this is a $200 bottle of a rare vintage, yeah, seal that baby up after every single pour, even if you think you may have a second glass in a little while.

If this is a $9 bottle from Trader Joe's, eh. A budget bottle can breathe for a couple hours without being destroyed. Definitely if you're drinking wine in the universe where boxed wine from Target is "reliably good", this just doesn't make much difference at all. My habit with simple affordable wines is to re-cork the bottle after I'm done for the night and make sure to finish it off within a few days.

My dad is serious about wine, drinks expensive and Important wines, and does the reused half-bottle trick.
posted by Sara C. at 12:22 AM on June 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

You don't need to "let wine breathe" unless it's quite tannic. A young bottle of Bordeaux? Yeah, leave it open for a couple of hours first. Anything else, there's no point.

Box wine can indeed be quite good, but it too goes bad eventually, and the large quantities involved, combined with the slow rate at which my wife and I drink wine, mean it doesn't work for us. We buy cheapish bottles and use suction stoppers.

> The stopper/pump things are of marginal value

I have been using them for twenty years, and this is bullshit unless by "marginal" they mean "not perfect." Obviously the wine still goes bad, but it takes significantly longer to go bad, which is important when you don't drink a lot of wine at one go. (And "What? to the concept of leftover wine" is not only bullshit but offensive bullshit: yeah, I remember back in the day when I rarely had leftover wine, but even in those wine-bibulous days I didn't mock people who drank less.)
posted by languagehat at 9:19 AM on June 13, 2013

On a different note, I like to cook with saved wine, and open a bottle fresh for actual drinking. I do vac my wine (and always travel with the vac-u-vin and corks) but it's still not quite as good as a newly opened bottle, so I use the saved wine for cooking. A splash of red wine in scrambled eggs is a divine way to start the day.
posted by Capri at 12:47 PM on June 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

One more thing: this is the very best vacuum stopper I've used, because you can see if the vacuum is coming undone. It works as well as Private Preserve in keeping good red wine drinkable.
posted by bearwife at 1:46 PM on June 13, 2013

While you're drinking the wine, don't worry about recording or vacuum pumping it during a session if you're going to be serving multiple glasses.

The gauge of the neck of a wine bottle is small, there's nothing going on inside the bottle to agitate the liquid or air in there, and the air currents in your room are relatively weak and undirected. Basically, the wine really isn't breathing a lot while still in the bottle. Sure, some oxidation happens, but that's over more significant periods of time like a half day to a few days

I use a vacuum stopper and it definitely prolongs the shelf life of an open bottle of wine for almost a week.
posted by reddot at 3:03 PM on June 13, 2013