Fix ‘Corked’ Wine With A Bowl And Plastic Wrap

Dinner’s cooked, the guests are arriving, so you pop open that nice bottle of red and—ugh, what is that? If you’re stuck with a “corked” bottle, here’s how you can minimize the dankness. In a New York Times article on wine’s flavorful reactions to just about everything, out comes a tip from Andrew Waterhouse, a professor of wine chemistry at the University of California, Davis, on dealing with the effects of a tainted cork:

Mr. Waterhouse said that the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine, which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap.

“It’s kind of messy, but very effective in just a few minutes,” he said. The culprit molecule in infected corks, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is chemically similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic.

I’m not enough of an oenologist to be sure, but for any wine that seems a little off, a bit of oxygen exposure outside the bottle before serving seems to have helped. Got a better wine-saver? Spill it in the comments.