Woman shares easy, affordable wine bottle hack to keep it fresh

She couldn’t bottle up this hack any longer.
A TikToker revealed a genius way to keep your vino fresh: Fasten a plastic sports cap from a water bottle to the mouth of the wine bottle.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this but… you can use water bottle lids on WINE BOTTLES,” the content creator, who goes by Chantelle Fen, wrote on a resurfaced TikTok clip, which garnered more than 633,000 likes.
The nifty trick, which the creator said she discovered on Facebook, is especially helpful for those who lose, damage or accidentally toss the twist-off wine cap and need to keep the bottle fresh — if exposed to air for too long, the wine can sour.
Even if you plan on finishing the bottle later in the evening, putting some sort of closure, such as vacuum-sealed stoppers, keeps the beverage in mint condition.
“Oxygen is the enemy to wine,” sommelier Casleah Herwaldt, founder of the wine club By the Stem, told Popular Science.
However, with proper storage methods, the occasional wine drinker can extend the shelf life of their opened bottle — for red, that is typically four to five days, and whites or rosés will last two to three days.
While the original cork is fine to use, Herwaldt cautions against flipping it due to the debris that has accumulated on the exterior-facing end, which could alter the taste of the wine.
She also recommended storing the bottle upright and in the fridge, while putting the remaining wine in something like a mason jar is also an option.
Another sommelier, who is also an advocate for the mason jar method, previously explained why putting a cork in it — the bottle, that is — is a freshness no-no.
“If you were to put the cork back in a bottle of wine that’s half empty, you’ll see the oxygen and corks are porous,” Warner Boin said in a TikTok clip with more than 2.5 million views.
Instead, she added, vino indulgers want to “reduce the oxygen to wine ratio” by pouring it into an airtight container, like a mason jar.