Exposing an open bottle to less oxygen is more complicated, but there's a whole world of gadgets out there that purport to do this task. There are two main approaches: pumps, like the Vacu Vin, which ostensibly suck air out of the bottle, leaving a partial vacuum; and cans of tasteless, odorless, nonreactive gas, like Private Preserve, that you spray into the bottle, displacing the oxygen that's there. Of course, wine lovers being a creative (or desperate) bunch, all sorts of low-tech methods have been tried: drinking half the bottle, then decanting the rest into an empty half-bottle and chucking it into the fridge; freezing leftover wine to thaw later; even continuously filling the partly empty bottle with glass marbles, so that the remaining wine is always at the level of the cork.
Recently, I performed a series of blind taste tests to sort out which method—refrigeration, pumping out the air in the bottle or replacing the air with something else—works best. (My daughter greeted the idea of submerging her marble collection in wine with justifiable outrage, so I skipped that one.) My control was a bottle left sitting out on our tasting-room table. Over the course of several days, I compared all of these against each other; and, at the end of a week, against a freshly opened bottle. I also compared all of them to wine removed from a bottle every couple of days with a new gadget called a Coravin—more on that in a moment.
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