Does Wine Spoil Within A Few Days?!
Does Wine Spoil Within A Few Days?
I don't drink wine very much but thinking of having a small glass each night before bed. I heard that wine spoils very soon after opening a bottle, within a few days or week. But someone else said it doesn't spoil, just changes taste. Since I can't afford to buy a new bottle every few days and certainly not going to go thru it THAT fast lol.....needed to find out. Thanks!
Answers:
Sadly, wine does spoil after a few days. The problem is largely that throughout the wine-making process gases (such as sulphur dioxide) are pumped into wine-making tanks to prevent spoilage by displacing air and acting as a preservative. When you open your bottle of wine you subject the wine to air and displace the sulphur dioxide inside.
However, its not all bad news if your not too fussy about the flavour of your wine. Alcohol content will be lost from a bottle of wine over time, and the wine will oxidise (there are several types of oxidation, but overall oxidation generally produces compounds which don't taste very nice, and can sometimes be harmful in high doses or dosage over a long period of time).
The high alcohol content of wine (12-15%) prevents most microbial growth, and this will prevent you from getting a food-borne illness (with very few exceptions).
Overall, I would keep opened wine in the fridge (with some sort of stopper, this will help slow the rate of most types of oxidation), and I would chuck it out after a week if you have any left! Once I did see a bottle of wine that had been opened for about a year and left sitting in a cabinet. It put me off drinking for a week there was a cloud of mould sitting in the bottom the size of my fist.
If you're still really worried or really fussy, try to find wine bottles that are of a smaller size (eg. half bottles or "piccolos"). Hope this helps!
Dunno,mine never lasts that long.
I've noticed wine spoil within 1-1.5 weeks if unrefrigerated. An open bottle lasts much longer if refrigerated. Refrigerating is ideal for white wine, but I like the way refrigerated red wine tastes too.
And it DOES spoil! So if it smells funky when you uncork it, toss it!
Wines are very sensitive to elements in the air around us, especially Oxygen. Hence, once the cork is removed, the process of oxidation starts and begins to diminish the wine quality affecting smoothness, taste and alcohol content.
To retard such oxidation, restaurants usually will keep your opened bottle of wine in a small bucket with ice. A few restaurants also use wine caps- to serve in place of the cork.
However, these are applicable to wines that come with cork stoppers.
You can shop for wines that come without the cork stoppers and instead, have conventional screw-down bottle caps made of metal. Wines with such bottle caps will not oxidize quickly when opened and you can retard the oxidation process by keeping the bottle in your fridge.
Alternatively, you can buy smaller sized bottles.
A reg.size(750l) bottle of wine has 4 glasses in it,red wine gets
acidic after the 2ND day.White wine is fine in fridge for a couple of days.It really depends how fussy you are,I'm born and raised in wine country and tend to be a bit snobby about wine,because that is the big thing around here,and I have come to aquire the taste of very good wine,at the perfect temp etc,etcI would say 3 dys max stored correctly and your own personal preference are all key here.
Wow, not as simple a question as one might think. When you open a bottle of wine you should always let it 'breath' for a while before drinking it. A couple of hours will usually do it. This is testimony as to how sensitive wine is to exposure to the oxygen in the air. This first change (breathing) is very good and mellows the taste of the wine (reduces the tannic taste in young wines). Even if you recork the bottle you have air trapped inside that will continue to oxidize the wine when closed. And No, it doesn't matter if it is a screw top botle or a corked bottle. Several gadgets are available to 'save' wine for a longer period. One is a stopper system that pulls the air out of the bottle while stoppering it up, another is a can of compressed nitrogen that you squirt into the bottle to drive out the air before recorking. just search on wine savers and you will find lots of gadgets for this purpose.
Puttig the bottle in the frig will help slow the reaction and will afford you maybe another day. It can be an interesting experiment to follow the change in taste with time to see how different wines react.