Preservation

[mamster]

Karen MacNeil-Fife did a column in Sunset last year asserting that none of the consumer-level wine preservation products (gas blanket, vacuum pump, and so on) work as well as reinserting the cork and leaving the bottle on the counter or in the fridge.

Is she right? How do you preserve your partially finished bottles--assuming you have any?

[Jancis Robinson]

I don't think that Vacu-vin thing works terribly well and have never really got to grips with the inert gas cylinders. (There's a recent story on my purple pages about how I was relieved of two new re-sealers with inert gas at Vienna airport by airport police thinking they were bombs.)

Like Karen, if by any chance I do want to return to a bottle I just re-stopper it and leave it somewhere cool and, obviously, not in direct sunlight. Not sure it works better than any of the other methods but I certainly don't think it's worse.