Published: September 26, 2007 09:59 am      

Wines don’t age well once they’re opened

Is there a recorked bottle of wine on your counter? Be honest: how long has it been open? Days? And you wonder why it doesn’t taste as good as that memorable moment last weekend when you decided to save some?

People cling to open bottles of wines like they cling to dirty potholders. Wine may improve with age but certainly not after it has been opened. So this week we’re going to give some advice about opened wines.

Once a wine is opened wine molecules exchange with air molecules and all those aromas that have been trapped begin to emerge. That’s why you hear advice to decant old wines, a dicey process that risks a quick evaporation of the wine’s fragile aromas.

A little oxygen is good, but a lot of oxygen is bad. At some point impossible to determine, the same air that released a wine’s bouquet begins to harm it. An older wine, in particular, will fall apart faster if it isn’t properly recorked.

A resealed wine will arrest or at least stabilize the oxidation process. But don’t think those cute stoppers with fancy tops will provide an adequate seal.

We reinsert a cork as soon as we uncork a wine. If you don’t do it right away, the cork swells and becomes much more difficult to reinsert.

A reused cork can give you an adequate seal for another day.

But if you want to keep wine for a few days (about as long as you can expect without any deterioration), you may want to consider using a gas that displaces the air in the bottle. Wine magazines sell these devices. Private Preserve, for instance, uses a combination of gases — nitrogen, carbon dioxide and argon — and are more effective than a Vacu-vin, which just sucks the air out of a bottle.

No matter how you reseal a bottle, it is important to keep it cool. Even a well-sealed bottle will deteriorate at room temperature. Put it back in a temperature-controlled cellar or the refrigerator — and that includes red wine.

If the bottle is at lest half empty, consider transferring the wine to a half bottle. It is worth your while to keep a clean 375 ml bottle around for such occasions.

We like to go back to a bottle to confirm our notes and often to see how it progresses. Some bottles, particularly white burgundy, can actually get better the next day — if the bottle has been adequately resealed.

By all means, don’t consume too much wine because you think the wine will sour in a day. Reseal the wine properly and extend your pleasure.