My roommate said that you can only recork wine once as after 2 times the holes in the cork get too big to keep the wine fresh. Is that true? Is a cork really needed in wine if I keep it in the fridge? Or is it just the aesthetics of it that perpetuate this rumor?
If its decent wine, you shouldn’t need to keep it in the fridge, and doing so would ruin it for the palate, for sure.
I would say that the spirit of your roommate’s admonition is correct even if the details are a little off base. The key to prolonging the life of a wine is keeping oxygen away from it. If you don’t finish a bottle of wine, then reclosing the bottle and sticking it in the fridge for a day or so is fine, and it’s okay to open and close the bottle more than once. If you want to keep an unfinished bottle a little longer (four or five days), you have a few more options. One would be to decant the wine into a container that can be filled completely, leaving no headspace. You could also try one of the various vacuum stopper systems. These consist of rubber or silicone stoppers paired with a little pump to remove air from the bottle. Another choice is to displace the air in the bottle with an inert gas. You can buy cans of a nitrogen/CO2/argon mixture that are pretty effective if you use about twice as much as the instructions typically recommend. I use argon in the tasting room to sparge partial bottles and close them with silicone stoppers.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the holes in the cork get too big”. If you reuse the cork, it’s not necessary to push it all the way back in so that you need a corkscrew to extract it. You DO need to close the bottle again, though. The cork’s not just there for “aesthetics”.
CynicalGabe, refrigerating an unfinished bottle will not “ruin it for the palate”. Anything that can be done to retard oxidation will help to preserve a wine, and that includes storing it at a lower temperature, whether it’s red or white. I would agree that long-term storage of unopened bottles in an ordinary refrigerator would be detrimental due to the vibration, light and low humidity. Of course long-term storage of opened bottles in any environment is futile.
Well, I haven’t seen a bottle of wine that lasted more than 2 openings 
You may want to try purchasing a better bottle stopper. My dad uses something that looks like the ‘Super Stopper’ on this page http://fantes.com/stoppers.htm and it seems to work well. It’ll certainly keep oxygen out, if you’re worried about that.
I admit, Nanoda’s response was the first one that occured to me. Given the small capacity of most wine bottles I’m amazed they could last any length of time.
Decent or not, unfinished bottles belong in the fridge. Course, I really can’t speak from experience, as I have a personal rule to always finish a wine bottle once opened.
And, of course, there’s plenty of wines which benefit from chilling…pretty much all whites (that I can think of—I’m sure there must be an exception somewhere) and roses/blushes. Even many reds benefit from a slight bit of chilling. I tend to like them room temperature (which at my house is around 62), but I was advised in a wine shop in Paris to drink the particular cabernet sauvignon I bought at around 55-60 degrees. So the common perception that reds should always be served room temp is misguided.
Right on! What’s this nonsense about recorking anyway?
This month’s Cook’s Illustrated compared different methods of wine preservation and noticed little difference, or benefit, from recorking, caping or the consumer available gas options. They did notice a significant benefit from the little white pumps/rubber stopper combo. This magazine does an excellent job of comparing products like these and in order to maintain objectivity they do not even have any advertisements in the magazine.
I cannot remember the brand name they tried, but I have a VacuVin which is the same idea if not identical product and it works quite well. I reccomend both the stopper and the magazine
Oh, and as for temperature, a common rule of thumb I have heard is take the white out of the frig 15 minutes before you are going to drink it and put the red in 15 minutes before drinking. Works well, but I generally prefer my reds a little warmer than that.
In a thread earlier this week I stated my preference for decanting into other bottles. I keep several clean bottles for the purpose ranging from 200 - 600 mls. As I live alone, if I want some wine with dinner I usually open the bottle, fill 2 200ml bottles and am left with 2 standard 150ml glasses for tonight. I find resealing far better than the gas methods which seem to be no improvement on simply recorking the bottle. I have friends who swear otherwise but I can taste the difference. Once you have the bottles decanting is free and is certainly not worse than any other method. I didn’t realise that refigeration made any difference so I just put the bottles in a dark cupboard.
I recall reading once that red wines really aren’t supposed to be served at the temperature common to rooms in most American homes. The article said that European homes have always been kept quite a bit cooler than here and that when reds are served at “room temperature” in Europe they are actually more likely in the 58 to 65 degree range and that this temperature is what is actually meant by “room temperature.” Ever since reading that I began putting my reds in the fridge for about twenty five minutes before serving them and I agree they’re better that way.
I also discovered just this last year that reds can be kept very well after opening by putting them in the fridge. I put mine (partially recorked) in the back of the fridge where it’s coldest and I never have any problem whatsoever keeping it fresh for several days.
I’ve read the same thing - basically, reds should be served cellar temperature or a little higher. It’s not fridge cold - a cellar, in temperate areas, is somewhere between 55 and 60 degrees. And furthermore, I have it on good authority from oenophiles that whites should be served nowhere near as cold as a refrigerator. As for myself, I definitely think they lose much of their flavor when served that cold.
I use a cork extractor that doesn’t put a hole in the cork. I put the cork back in as soon as I finish pouring. But I don’t generally have leftover wine, all that often. Besides, half the time we are talking about a bottle of Two-buck Chuck, or some recent Chilean vintage, so I guess I don’t really have the palette to discern the finer points. When I open a bottle especially fine wine I have a number of friends in attendance, and leftovers are even less likely.
Tris
“Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” ~ Erwin Schrodinger ~
I do, too. It’s funny, I put my reds in the fridge for twenty-five minutes before drinking them and I take my whites out of the fridge for twenty-five minutes before drinking them.
Here is a link to some ideas on what to do with “leftover wine.”
http://www.portlandphoenix.com/archive/food/00/09/22/EXTRA_EXTRA.html