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It’s easy to open a good bottle of wine and finish it all. No particular skill needed there. However, if you want to save some wine to drink later, it is important to understand how to preserve it. In order to do that, you must first understand how wine interacts with the environment.

Wine is an organic substance. It begins life as nothing but grape juice, but, over time, yeasts, tannins and oxygen break the compounds in the juice into their constituent parts, including alcohol, and create the complex product that we call wine. Many people mistakenly believe that once wine has been bottled and corked, it stays exactly as is until opened. That could not be farther from the truth. Natural wine corks do not seal the bottle off completely. The pores in the cork let in tiny amounts of oxygen over time that continues to age and mellow the wine. That’s why some of the best wines in the world are from thirty and forty year old vintages. Those same wines would have been practically undrinkable when first bottled but time and oxygen work their magic slowly.

While tiny amounts of oxygen are good for wines, large amounts are not and result in oxidation of the wine over time. If you take for example a half full bottle of wine that has had its cork stuck back in it, there is a half bottle of air on top of the wine. The oxygen will break down the wine compounds rapidly and will produce off-tastes and off-smells. Sherry is a product that has been intentionally oxidized as part of its process, so if your wine smells more like sherry, it is likely oxidized. You will also notice if you hold a glass of oxidized wine up in bright light, it will be browning rather than a deep red. You can never “unoxidize” wine so half-full bottles often end up getting thrown out rather than enjoyed.

The traditional French way of ensuring that wine doesn’t oxidize is to drink it all. However, if you have to save a part bottle of wine, there are options as to how to handle it.

The most important rule is to get the oxygen out of the bottle- or at least away from the surface of the wine. One way to do this is with a VacuVin. A VacuVin is a wine stopper that also sucks out all of the oxygen, leaving a vacuum behind. You simply place the stopper on the top of the bottle and pump up and down to manually extract out the air. Because the wine is no longer exposed to oxygen, it will not deteriorate before you have an opportunity to finish off the bottle.

Another method is a product called Private Preserve Spray. This bottle contains an inert gas that is heavier than air. When you spray it into the neck of a partly-filled bottle of wine, the gas sinks to rest on the wine’s surface, forcing the air out of the bottle. This is similar to the old Italian method of wine preservation which is to pour a layer of olive oil on top. The preserve spray is a much more practical method of keeping the wine from the air.