Sunday, Jun. 01, 2003

Preserving that half-empty bottle

By Ken Robertson

Q. My spouse and I often open a nice bottle of wine and drink only about half of it. Once it’s open, what’s the best way to preserve the leftovers?

A. Your question is one we see often enough that it inspired a carefully controlled experiment to test three of the favored preservation methods against one another and against the option many of us choose: Do nothing at all to protect a wine from the ravages of oxygen.

Hank Sauer of Kennewick, Wash., who helps facilitate Wine Press Northwest’s tasting panel evaluations, set up our experiment and proctored it. He started with five 750-milliliter bottles each of two wines: Columbia Winery’s 2002 Cellarmaster’s Reserve Riesling and Columbia Crest’s 2001 Grand Estates Syrah.

We chose the two wines because they are from high-volume, consistent-quality wineries, which minimizes the chance the tasters’ perceived differences between the bottles would result from bottle and batch variations.

For both wines, Hank set aside a control bottle, then opened four others and emptied out half the contents. The four bottles were left standing open for three hours — a fairly typical fate of wine during a leisurely dinner party.

Then, one bottle in each batch was corked with a Vacu-Vin stopper and the air pumped out. In a second, the air was replaced with the gas from Private Preserve (a mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and argon) and recorked. A third bottle was poured into a half-bottle (375 ml), creating a filled bottle with normal ullage, and recorked. The fourth bottle was simply recorked with its wine exposed to half a bottle of plain air and the oxygen it contains.

The four bottles and the control bottle in each batch were set aside for 72 hours (three days), then poured and tasted blind by a panel of five Wine Press Northwest writers and editors.

We all made notes about the five wine samples, as we normally would during a tasting, then rated them, from favorite to least favorite. When we tallied the scores, we awarded a 1 to the first-place wine of each taster, a 2 to the next favorite, etc.

Theoretically, if all of us agreed, the best wine’s minimum score would have been 6, the least favorite could have scored 30. For our scores on the Riesling, that almost happened. The top-rated wine scored 7, the bottom-rated wine 30.

Five of six on our panel picked the same bottle as the best and the other panelist placed it second. We were unanimous in our choice of the bottle that ranked last. Four of six rated the second-place bottle second and the third-place bottle third. Five of six rated the fourth-place bottle fourth. And four of six gave identical rankings to all five bottles. At this point, it was indeed a near-perfect world. The first-place bottle was the previously unopened control bottle, which retained all the traits expected from a well-crafted Riesling.

The second-place bottle had been closed with the Vacu-Vin stopper and its air pumped out. My notes show I thought it seemed to have just a touch more bitterness — I guessed acid — than the others. Perhaps its acid was better preserved than its three opened counterparts, perhaps also a little less balanced by the fresher aromas and flavors of the control bottle.

The 375 ml bottle ranked a close third. My notes show I thought its flavors and aromas had faded a tad. Fourth was the 750 ml bottle that had simply been recorked. Its aromas had faded somewhat and had acquired a little note of cabbage.

Fifth was the bottle filled with Private Preserve. It appeared a little darker and tasted a bit flat from diminished acid. None of the test bottles had faded so badly as to be undrinkable, but the differences were clear.

The Syrah was not so easy, and our scores were closely bunched. The favorite had a cumulative score of 11; the bottom-ranked wine 23.

To our surprise, the least favorite was the control bottle! The favorite had been treated with Private Preserve; second went to the half-full 750-ml bottle that had been only recorked; third to the bottle with the Vacu-Vin stopper; and fourth to the 375-ml bottle.

The tasting panel retained some of its unanimity. Four of us rated the same bottle as our favorite. Three rated the fourth-place bottle fourth and three rated the fifth-place bottle fifth.

But clearly, we liked our fresh young red wine to have a little exposure to air. My notes show I liked the favorite for its bolder, balanced fruit aromas and flavors. The second-ranked bottle had been exposed to the most air, since it was the recorked 750 ml bottle.

I’m not sure the difference in score among the third-, fourth- and fifth-ranked bottles was significant. Only three points separated them. For the young red wine used in this test, a few days’ exposure to air clearly was not enough to create serious damage. A longer test probably would have told us more. As for our white, the steps to preserve it clearly helped. And I suspect an older red would show the same clear benefits.

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