Can’t finish a bottle in one sitting? Here’s what to do with leftover wine
Sometimes a bottle of wine just doesn’t get finished in a single night. In those cases, I say: Embrace the lifestyle of wine leftovers.
At any given moment, I always have several partially empty bottles of wine in my kitchen. Half a bottle of Pinot Noir here, an inch’s worth of Chardonnay there. I feel no pressure to finish any bottle on any particular timeframe.
Most of the time, these odds and ends do eventually get consumed. I love revisiting wines after they’ve been open for a few days to see how they evolve (or disintegrate, as the case may be). I’m always moving back and forth between my various partial bottles: a cold glass of white while I’m cooking, a more substantial red with dinner.
It’s a myth that wine won’t last past the day it’s opened. You’d be surprised how long some wines can stay fresh, especially high-acid wines like Riesling, which can go for a week or more. Many wines taste better the next day, especially young, tannic red wines, whose tight grip tends to loosen up after a day or two’s worth of oxygen exposure. I’ve written before about the various wine-preservation devices available, and my favorite method is still the simplest: Stick the cork back in the bottle and keep it in the fridge.
But sometimes a bottle isn’t worth finishing, and that’s OK too. I revel in the leftovers lifestyle in part because I love the feeling of skirting commitment, the freedom to not finish a disappointing wine just because the cork happens to be removed. Liberate yourself from that shackle!
And this brings me to the other spate of options for wine leftovers: repurpose them in other foods and drinks.
Julia Child famously admonished her followers to never cook with wine they wouldn’t drink. This is terrible advice. It would be a shameful waste to cook with wine that you would drink. You will not taste the nuances of a great wine by the time it has simmered with lardons for hours in your boeuf bourguignon. In fact, whatever you do, do not, as that dish’s name implies, use actual, good red Burgundy!
I have fairly low standards for cooking wine, and I’ll often combine multiple bottles, as long as they’re the same color. I also don’t mind if the bottles have been sitting in the cabinet for a few months. Oxidized white wines can be perfect in certain recipes, especially as substitutes for Sherry.
In my kitchen, those browning bottles of white wine often get tossed into marinades. A nutty white mixed with some grainy mustard and a little brown sugar makes a great marinade for pork tenderloin. Combined with soy sauce, it can also be ideal for flank steak or skirt steak that’s going on the grill.
One of my favorite uses for red wine is in this chocolate cake, a Deb Perelman recipe that originated when a reader needed to find a substitute for buttermilk. The resulting cake does taste a little like red wine, with a delightful bitterness that plays well off the chocolate. But that still doesn’t mean you need to use a great wine for it.
May I also suggest, during this especially warm week in the Bay Area, that any disappointing bottles might also be turned into a boozy slushie? This would work especially well with a wine that turned out to taste sweeter than you’d hoped, since most recipes for frosé and its ilk tend to call for some added sugar.
There’s only one case in which I’ll pour a bottle down the drain: if it’s corked. I draw the line at the notion of a cork-tainted coq au vin.
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