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May 28, 2009

A Lung Full of Air

I run into this really annoying problem with the elaborate recycling regime in Cambridgeshire.

I normally collect all of my wine bottles and pop them into a green plastic box ready for collection. Unfortunately this box is extremely hazardous.

The dregs from the bottles ultimately run and gather into putrid oxidized pools at the bottom of the box. A sort of dark rose that could happily burn a hole through several floors if spilt, much like the blood from the film Alien. This is a perfect, if not slightly extreme example of the poor fate of an open bottle of wine if left too long before consuming.

Moving this box ready for collection is a nightmare. The evil liquid invariably finds its way out of engineered holes and all over my trousers (I am sure the box designers are still chuckling about this 'feature'). I arrive back in the house looking and smelling like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The fantastic speed of the action of oxygen on wine is both excellent and really frustrating. Initially it shakes hands with the wine, and is perfectly charming, even improving the taste of some wines for a short while. Then, just when you least expect it, nasty things start happening and you eventually end up with vin aigre which is old French for 'sour wine' and hence the word vinegar.

This presents more issues for me as I rarely get more that three quarters of my way through a bottle in the working week, when it becomes unpalatable (after maybe two to three days depending on the wine). This happens due to multiple bottles being opened to complement my evening meal.

This is where I wished half bottles were a solution. But they are really not. They age in their cute 375ml bottles at breakneck speed due to the ratio of oxygen to wine, so when opened a half bottle will often taste different to its larger counterpart containing exactly the same wine. In a nutshell they carry unpredictably volatile contents, exacerbated greatly when opened. They are also very hard to get hold of, difficult to store and quite frankly give the impression of a distinct lack of a full commitment to wine, a slightly dull, cautious approach.

They look like they belong in a large dolls house, not on the dining room table.

The normal 750ml bottle has so much allure and romance. For example it is said that until the 1600s all bottles were hand blown, and the standard size we have today was dictated by the glass blowers breath, a lung full of air. Who am I to argue with that.

On the other hand I often buy sweet wine in half bottles which will seemingly keep until the sun turns into a red giant (no, nothing whatsoever to do with GM sweetcorn) in about 5 billion years, and boils off the bottle, and indeed us too.

So are there good solutions for keeping bottles drinkable after opening? I spoke briefly about one contraption back in 2006 here . But there are other ways, like squirting inert gas into the bottle and replacing the cork (sounds a real palaver).

Maybe I could just talk to my bottles, and then the hot air (CO2) will gradually replace the oxygen inside.....but I am sure tedium of my monologue may well turn the wine sour anyway.

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