Wine preservation

How do you keep your wine tasting fresh?

Here is a dilemma that I rarely find myself in. You’ve just opened a lovely bottle of wine and enjoyed a couple of glasses of your favourite plonk and decided to save the rest for another day. So how do you keep your wine tasting fresh?

For many a year the only answer to this problem was to put a cork or a wine stopper in it and keep it at the correct temperature. This however only maintains your wine for 24 hours or so. The reason is in the air around us.

Oxygen is the enemy of all wine.

Once exposed to oxygen, wine starts to deteriorate and it affects almost all its qualities. The longer it is exposed the nose will become less pronounced. The palette will become dull, in fact, every element will undergo change for the worse. In other words, unless you really don’t care what your wine tastes like, you only have a day or so to enjoy the true taste of the wine.

It has been like this for many years but thanks to modern day technology many bars and even households are starting to embrace new methods to maintain the wine once opened for 20 even 60 days once the first glass has been poured.

Offering an impressive 30 plus wines by the glass would be financial suicide for any wine bar, unless that is, you have an “Enomatic’. This very clever machine holds multiple bottles of wine in a glass display cabinet and is card operated. The customer simply purchases a prepaid card and chooses to dispense 50, 125 or 175ml amounts at time. Once it has dispensed the wine it injects a small amount of nitrogen into the empty space leaving no room for air hence the wine stays fresh and clean opening up the possibilities of trying a world class wine by the glass.

If you prefer something a bit more hands on ‘Corovin’ has designed a handheld device which you clamp around the neck of the bottle. On top of the clamp is a small needle which extracts wine through the cork whilst injecting another inert gas, argon, back into the bottle. The cork reseals itself and was such the bottle in theory should last for years.

At £600 it maybe a bit steep for the average family but as is the way with most technology the prices will come down.

The future is bright in fact its rose, and white, and red.

Food & Wine by Paul Sheerin
Pshearse@gmail.com