No Cork, No Stopper…No Wine?

Tessa A. asked Heard It Through the Grapevine:

"How do you store an open bottle of wine without a cork or bottle stopper?"

I’m sure most of us wine lovers have come across this problem a time or two. Either the cork has crumbled from trying to remove the cork or you just can’t get the cork back into the bottle. However, you don’t have a bottle stopper to stop the bottle. So what do you do?

The simplest thing to do would be to pour the wine into a decanter with a seal-fit stopper.This may allow you to store smaller amounts of wine without as much exposure to oxygen. The wine must fill up to the bottom of the stopper to prevent the wine from aging. Also, serving "leftover" wine from a decanter makes for a more attractive presentation when serving it. Prices for decanters can range from as low as $3.95 to $300. So the amount you spend would be based on how you’d like to present your wine.

Other methods would be to use pumps or nitrogen sprays to displace the oxygen in the bottle. It's primarily oxygen that interacts with the wine and microscopic elements in the wine that cause it it to spoil. However, these methods have shown to not extend the life of wines much and are a bit expensive.

For a more inexpensive method of preserving your wine, here’s a tip from e.how.com at click here.