Wine hacks!

I like drinking wine, but truly enjoying wine can be kind of a pain: so many grapes with which to feign familiarity and all those adjectives that no one ever intended to describe a beverage. Plus, wine goes bad really quickly! What’s the deal with that?

Here are some tips for enjoying wine as painlessly as possible.

Screw-off tops

Corks are annoying. No matter how good you are at unscrewing them, eventually you’ll have trouble and break a cork, which is embarrassing and wasteful. So we ought to praise winemakers who have ditched corks in favor of screw-off tops. They keep the wine just as well, don’t require “practice,” and work without any additional paraphernalia.

Plenty of great, inexpensive wines come with screw-off caps now, so send a message to rest of the industry and buy those bottles. Corks are really only necessary for cellared wines that need just a little bit of oxygen to seep in over time for aging to occur. Do you own a wine cellar? No.

Boxed wine

It turns out that the world of boxed wine extends beyond the Franzia you drank in college. And that’s a good thing because bottles are a really dumb way of storing wine. You open a bottle, drink one or two glasses, stick the rest in the fridge, and the wine goes bad a few days later. This is pretty common for people who drink alone or in pairs.

But boxes can keep fresh wine flowing for weeks! Months, even. And plenty of decent wine comes in boxes. I recommend Black Box and French Rabbit (pictured above).

Wine pumps

Another good solution to keeping wine fresh is a wine pump. Buy this one for $10 and never again let a good bottle go bad.

Have a wine you like

I like the 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon by Joel Gott because it’s good and costs less than $20. You might like it, too! But in any event, it’s always useful to just, like, have a wine you know you like. That’s so much easier than having a favorite grape or region or whatever.

Or, when in doubt, just buy the less expensive bottle.