There is an old joke, that nobody has ever heard of left over wine, alas that is not the case in reality.  One of the best laws that occurred in Michigan is that you can now leave a restaurant with an unfinished bottle of wine, rather than trying to finish off the bottle before you leave (just remember to put the unfinished bottle in your trunk and not in your back seat).

I have seen articles that recommend that left over wine can be frozen in ice trays, and then use these wine cubes later when cooking, when you need to add wine to a dish or sauce.  I think that this idea has merit, though I have never tried it.  So what can one do with left over wine?

The first thought is just to use the cork that was used to initially seal the bottle of wine, but this is not the best idea as cork is porous.  There are a lot of fancy bottle stoppers out on the market, and through the course of years we have received a lot of them as gifts.  Some are rather plain, some are fancy wrought in metals and some are even done in crystal.  We even have a special clamping stopper that was created for storing left over champagne which keeps the bubbles from dissipating.

One of the handiest items that we have is tool called the VacuVin.  This is a handy little device which has a rubber cork that is placed in the bottle, then the VacuVin is put on top of the rubber cork and one just lifts the handle up and down and it pumps out any air in the bottle before storage.  This has worked very well for us through the years, when we do have left over wine.  In fact there have been times where the wine ended up tasting better the second or third day then when it was originally opened.