I popped the cork, immediately poured half the bottle into the 375 empty and jammed the original cork (so I would know what was in there) into the 375 so that there was no air between the cork and the wine. How long will this last in the cellar?
My experience is that it depends more on the cork than anything else. If you damaged the cork pulling it out of the original bottle then it’s unlikely to last very long time in the cellar, otherwise it’ll be fine for quite a while. I’ve lost homemade half bottles in my cellar for a few years and they have been surprisingly good when I discovered them again.
months to years depending on the wine, IMO.
alan
A friend of mine used to do this and I had good half bottles as much as 15 years later - and some of these were mixed leftovers from tastings.
It depends on the wine. A very young wine might be able to integrate the oxygen and last for a couple of years. The older the wine, the shorter the time it will survive the transfer. In general, I think this is a great technique for wine that will be opened in a few days or weeks, but it is very risky for longer term aging.
Anyone attempt this with a 375ml screwcap?
Do they make 375ml screwies? Seems more convenient than a cork jammed into it.
I tried this once (regular cork 375ml) and the wine tasted just as oxidized as if it were vacuvined, left in the 750ml and corked, etc.
Wow. I’m stunned by this. I would have thought that the oxygen uptake that’d inevitably be a function of the transfer would have suggested a much shorter life…
Something strikes me as off about that result. I’m drinking a left over Henri Bourgeois Sancerre from a few days ago, there was some air in the 375, but I refrigerated it and it’s the same or better than a few days ago.
I have to say, though, that I’d not rely on this for long term aging. Even with a top notch cork… but then once something is open it’s fair game around here.
I think this is a question for Paul Savage!
I probably had four or five of these and drank most of them within five years, and I don’t recall any oxidized examples. I forgot about the other one and uncovered it several years ago.
My friend was a serial re-bottler as his wife wasn’t drinking much if at all. He treated his corks and bottles just as if he were doing the original bottling.
I should say that my expectations were low for the older one, but what I remember was a very good wine (it was a mix of good mid-80’s Cab blends, I think including Montelena and/or Dominus). My guess is that you get something better than a poorly treated bottle, but worse than a a well-stored original.
@Craig - thanks for the data point(s). I have to admit that it’s unlikely that anything I drink “tonight” will last as a leftover, in any form or fashion, 15 years down the road.
I lack that kind discipline:)
My experience with Vacu-Vin is that temperature is still critical. I always stick my reds back in the cellar after vacuuming, as my results at room temp were very poor. Most often I can keep them another few days in the cellar without a big problem. This depends a lot on the airspace too, so I could see a half bottle being pretty effective.
@Craig - I often go one step further and if I don’t want the wine to significantly develop, will throw it in the fridge.
Peter, I do this all the time with both corks and with screwcap bottles, often reused water bottles (Perrier and the like). I keep an assortment of various size clean empties around… 500 ml; 375 ml; 250 ml… some with screwcaps and some I need a cork. I’m totally sold on this decanting into a smaller bottle as a method to stretch a bottle of wine over a few dinners. I’ve never tried the long term approach, however; one or two weeks has been as long as I’ve gone.
Keith Levenberg, I am greatly flattered (I think??) that you have somehow remembered my experiments with rebottling into 375s. For young wines, or rather full-bodied or tannic ones, an immediate transfer into a clean 375 should work satisfactorily, without the need to add sulfite. For an older wine, or a delicate white, I use some sulfite addition to counteract (and remove) the oxygen introduced when pouring. Here is the complete story, which I’m sure all of you will be SO grateful that I had saved in Notepad, and was able to find again!! 
Here’s how I use metabisulfite (either sodium or potassium) when saving a 375. Metabisulfite is very cheap and available as a powder at any winemaking supply place on the web.
First…
1 level teaspoon of metabisulfite equals about 8 grams, and
400 ml of water is 400 grams (remember your chemistry?).
I dissolve 1 level teaspoon of metabisulfite into 400 ml of water (let’s say 375 ml, as that is
close enough…), to get a 2 % solution of metabisulfite by weight. I’ve read that the available
sulfite is about half of that, so we have about a 1 % solution of available sulfite in that
solution. This is my “stock solution” that I save to use as needed. It will keep (stay effective) for months.
The usual terminology in winemaking when referring to sulfite additions, is in terms of “parts
per million”, and when racking a wine, my home winemaking books suggest adding 50 ppm. The free sulfite combines readily with any free oxygen to form a tasteless sulfate. So the sulfite will remove any free oxygen from the grape juice, as long as there is enough sulfite to match the oxygen content.
The 1% solution of sulfite is “one part per hundred”, or multiplying this out, the equivalent
terminology would also be “10 parts per thousand”, or 10,000 parts per million. Obviously much more concentrated than we want for a wine addition.
Now, the stock solution is at a concentration of 10,000 ppm. If we were to add one milliliter of this to 1000 millilters of wine, we would be diluting it by 1000 times, to result in 10 parts per million in the wine! Actually, in 750ml it works out to about 13 ppm.
Some more useful “weights and measures”…
1/4 level teaspoon = 1 ml. (maybe 1 1/4 ml.)
1/2 level teaspoon = 2 ml (maybe 2 1/2 ml.)
1 level teaspoon = 5 ml.
So, we could add 1/2 level teaspoon of the stock solution to 750ml of wine and get about 26 ppm of sulfite addition. For 375ml of wine, we would need half of that, or 1/4 level teaspoon, to result in about a 26 ppm addition of sulfite, a reasonably good estimate for what would be
useful. Not as much as the 50ppm I mentioned earlier, but this amount seems to work OK in this situation.
When I save a 375 immediately upon opening a 750, I generally add 1 or 2 ml of this stock
solution to the empty 375, before transferring the wine, to counteract (and remove) any free
oxygen introduced by the pouring. This seems to work very well. I once opened a bunch of half botles that I had saved about 10 years earlier, and much to my surprise, they were all fine! They had aged a bit, of course, but in what seemed to be a normal manner, in that they were more integrated, and perhaps softer, but none were OTH or showing any adverse signs.
Btw, I think you have to get above 50 ppm before the sulfite might become noticeable on the nose. Aeration will remove it, of course, as it combines readily with free oxygen to form a tasteless sulfate, but it will take 30 - 60 minutes for the oxygen to combine and remove any traces of excess sulfite. You have to do this sometimes with young German wines, which are often bottled with quite a bit of sulfite to protect them from oxidation and preserve their freshness.
Nowadays, I tend to opt for a simpler solution, and just finish the whole damn bottle in one
sitting! ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Paul’s post is definitive and authoritative. As another anecdotal data point, I transfer to 375s regularly, and my general impression is that the effect on non-young wine of exposure to the atmosphere during transfer is like one of very slow oxygenation. Sometimes this works out great - a Burgundy just short of maturity crossed the line during three days in a refrigerated 375 and was great. I avoid the procedure with wines I think fully mature, however.
Ian,
Another thing I remember, from when I used to save 375s more regularly, was that they were often best after having rested for at least a few days (and I would also refrigerate them if planning to drink them relatively soon). I think everything has a chance to settle down and recover. Maybe like the situation with winemakers who won’t offer freshly bottled wine for tasting - it takes time for the wine to recover from the process…
Makes sense. We juggle re-sealed halves all the time, because it lets us have glasses of two or three different wines in a single night (between two people). I’ve never tried to store on for longer than a week or so, though. I learned the trick originally from reading Cliff Rosenberg’s notes.