A tasting party with four wines almost always ends with four partly full bottles. Unlike whisky, which can sit open for a year with little change, wine starts losing ground the night you pull the cork. How fast depends on the style, the temperature and how much air is in the bottle.
What actually goes wrong
Once a bottle is open, oxygen gets to work. The first thing to go is the fresh fruit on the nose. After that, the wine turns flat and a little bruised, like an apple left cut on the counter. Left long enough, bacteria convert the alcohol to acetic acid, and the bottle smells like vinegar or nail polish remover.
None of this is unsafe. It just makes the wine worse to drink.
Roughly how long each style keeps
Assuming you recork the bottle and refrigerate it right away:
- Sparkling wine: 1 to 3 days with a proper clamp-on sparkling stopper. The bubbles go before the flavor does.
- Light whites and rosé: 3 to 5 days.
- Reds: 3 to 5 days. Yes, in the fridge. Cold slows oxidation for reds too. Take the bottle out about half an hour before you pour it.
- Boxed wine: several weeks. The bag collapses as you pour, so air never gets in.
- Fortified wine: longer. Tawny port and other wines that were aged in contact with air hold up for weeks. Fino and manzanilla sherry are the exception: treat them like a white wine.
What helps and what doesn't
- Less air. Pour leftovers into a smaller bottle that it fills to the top. A clean half bottle (375ml) is ideal. This works better than any gadget.
- Inert gas sprays. A canister of argon blend lays a blanket over the wine so oxygen can't reach it. Cheap and effective.
- Vacuum pumps. They pull out some of the air, not all of it. Better than nothing, worse than a smaller bottle.
- A spoon in the Champagne. It does nothing. The cold fridge is doing the work.
- Screw caps reseal better than a cork forced back in upside down.
Plan the leftovers before the party
Open bottles in the order you'll pour them instead of all at once, so a bottle nobody reaches stays sealed. Tired reds go into a braise, a pan sauce or a batch of mulled wine, where heat and spice hide the fade. Flat sparkling wine still works in a mimosa or a risotto. Anything that smells like vinegar goes down the drain.
For spirits, the rules are different, and our guide on how long opened whisky lasts covers them.
Buy for the night you're having
The easiest fix is buying the right amount. Our Wine & Cheese kit sets the pour size and bottle count for your guest list, so four bottles become a full tasting instead of four bottles you're racing to finish by Thursday.