The title pretty much says it all. China Wife enjoys bubbly a bit, but we usually don’t drink the full bottle. If it could keep for a few days, champagne would be a lot more cost effective and popular in this household.
Suggestions? Bueller?
We have a old version of this, seems to work for the day or two a bottle lasts here.
Yup, that’s what we use as well. Won’t keep it forever, but definitely keeps for a few days.
And if it goes too flat for drinking after that, flat champagne makes wonderful cooking wine. Try it in a shellfish sauce over pasta.
Buy smaller bottles.
Ideally, you’d put the champagne cork back in the bottle, then put the bottle in the fridge. However, champagne corks expand so much that you can’t do that. One solution is to keep a few corks from other bottles of wine, and use one of those to reseal the champagne bottle. That should work for one or two days in the fridge (though the champagne will never be as bubbly as when it was first opened).
thanks. Will pick up one of these stoppers although Giles you may be right that old wine corks work just as well.
Just wanted to say this is what we used when I worked at a wine bar.
We got a champagne stopper and it kept it bubbly in the refrigerator for at least a week.
Yep, we use that as well.
You’d think (or at least I would) that in a manner opposite the vacuum pump that keeps wine fresh they’d have a pump available that pressurizes champagne, thereby keeping the bubbles in suspension and ‘good’ for awhile longer. Or do the physics of it not work that way?
There used to be little bulbs containing carbon dioxide under pressure that you could use to make soda water. I wonder if you can still get them, or is bottled soda water too cheap to make it worth selling them?
No way that you would wish to add carbon dioxide - the bubbles would be way too large. The whole pleasure of champagne is that is it naturally effervescent.
Yeppers. The bigger chain liquor stores (I’m in TX - YMMV according to local blue laws) carry a few champagnes in 375 mL bottles - easily enough for two people to polish off. Ask for “half bottles.”
I remember reading in some cooking magazine a few years ago that if you transfer the bubbly into a clean plastic pop bottle, squeeze the plastic down until the liquid level is at the top of the bottle and then seal it with the screwcap, you can preserve the carbonation better. Or maybe that was just to keep still wines from oxidizing. Can’t remember, but it’s worth a try and it’s cheap! The bottles do tend to fall over, though!
Or bigger glasses.
Good lord, who are these people who can’t drink a full bottle of bubbly between two people? My problem is limiting it to two bottles. Used to be back when I was a young 'un, I could go through massive quantities of champagne - New Year’s Day 2000 was not only the new millennium, but also my 30th birthday, and I think something like 6 bottles were consumed between Mr. Athena and I on New Year’s Eve.
To sum up: 1/2 bottle? Why bother?
That’s wine. I think the carbonation lost from pouring from the large bottle to the smaller one would outweigh any benefits of the smaller bottle.
I’m a beer drinker, so I’ll have a glass since my wife wants to open a bottle. She can but usually doesn’t want to polish the whole thing off. Anyhoo, I bought a champagne stopper.
You get a lot better price performance from a full bottle instead of a half. Probably the best deal out there is the magnum size.
Definitely a great idea
Also, I just use a sharp knife and shave down the cork that came with the bubbly…because not everyone has a fancy bubbly topper contraption just lying around.
zombie or no
an empty bottle keeps well.
It’s all about the partial pressure of CO2, and pressurizing the bottle with air doesn’t change that. ISTR we had a thread about doing the same thing with soda a while back.