The Proper Way To Recork Wine

When you sit down with a good bottle of wine, you're not always in the company of friends and family. Sometimes you just need to spoil yourself. Perhaps you've had a hard week, need to celebrate a personal success, or ordered some food from your favorite restaurant that you just know will pair perfectly with the bottle you've been saving. Wine is meant to be sipped and savored, so when you're done with your glass but haven't finished the bottle, you can cork it to enjoy at a later date. 

It's a good plan: Wine Folly says that after opening a bottle of wine, it could last between three and five days (depending on the wine) before it goes bad, which means you have plenty of time to sip on it after its initial opening. But if you are planning on saving your bottle, it is important that you recork the wine immediately after pouring yourself a glass or else you might find that your beautiful bottle of wine spoils more quickly.

Why is it so important to recork a bottle of wine quickly and efficiently? Well, Sonoma Wine Garden tells us that the moment a cork is removed from the bottle, the wine begins to oxidize, meaning that chemically the wine starts to alter and age. So, you only want to open up a bottle of wine at the exact time you plan to pour yourself a glass and recork it promptly in order to preserve its quality for longer. It isn't a perfect solution of course, but there are ways to ensure that you recork your wine in a way that keeps the beverage from souring too rapidly.

Wine Magazine recommends that if you want to keep your wine bottle safe from outside bacteria, we wine drinkers need to stop recorking wine with the "clean" side of the cork. The stained side is safe to shove back into the bottle (it was there before after all) but the clean side might very well taint the leftover wine. And, if you're dealing with a damaged cork, or want to be extra safe, MasterClass claims you should wrap wax paper or some sort of air-tight substance around the cork and then re-insert it into the neck of the bottle. This will keep the cork pieces from falling into the wine. And, if you have a wine cork-stopper at home already, that will work as well.