It happens to every drinker sooner or later: You come home excited for the first sip of wine, pop that cork, and then realize you’ve got a real stinker. What was purchased to provide pleasure is only bringing you pain. You could dump the bottle. But, come on, it’s still usable booze, so why not fix it? All it takes is a basic understanding of flavor and scent, along with some household items. Bad wine shouldn’t be exiled. It should be rehabilitated.
Remember: Wine is food. Using basic scientific methods to doctor it up is like adding seasoning. Some wines are like eating at upscale restaurants, but the stuff we often grab quickly on the way home is more like fast food: It needs some ketchup. Adding a squeeze of lemon to cheap, watery wine should be no more taboo than adding lime to cheap, watery beer. What is a wine punch, like sangria, if not bad wine sweetened with liqueur, soured with citrus, and aerated in pitchers and bowls?
Of course, you’re not going to make small-batch punches when you just want a simple glass of wine. That’s where science comes in. To figure out how to “fix” bad wine, we got some vino and tinkered with it. To ensure the wine’s unpleasantness, we spent no more than $5 on any bottle (far less on most). These wines were bad. But with a little know-how and a touch of MacGyverism, we fixed them. Here’s how.
The most common way for drinkers to enhance good wine is to decant it. A freshly opened bottle of wine will have been locked inside a tight space for months, or preferably, years. Decanting wine into a wide-mouth vessel allows more oxygen to get into the drink. However, if your cheap wine has an unpleasant stench, you might want to keep some of those aromas locked up.
Since 90% of “tasting” is actually smelling, we tried drinking bad wine out of tumblers with lids, or “sippy cups.” By keeping the lid on, we were spared from the uncomfortable aromas. To then further enhance this experiment, we played with perfuming the lid. Try rubbing the area where your nose hits with an aroma that complements the style. If drinking a cheap merlot, for example, try rubbing the lid with blackberries. The experiment will have you tasting better wine without adding anything directly to the liquid.
On the other hand, if a wine wasn’t properly exposed to oxygen during the winemaking process, it becomes strangled and the aromatic compounds can’t blend. This creates sulfur compounds that cause a wine to be “reduced.” Reduced wine has the unpleasant aromas of boiled vegetables, rotten eggs, and burnt rubber — not the exactly the flowery description the label promised. Some hours in a decanter can allow these smells to “blow off” and let the more promised fruity smells prevail. We gave an at-home aeration system a go to speed up the process of adding oxygen, and it helped some. Wine can be aerated faster in a blender or by using a whisk. We experimented with both on a malodorous screw-top pinot grigio and found that whisking worked just as well as blending, and made for an easier cleanup.
You can effortlessly aerate wine by keeping it open for a few days before you drink it. Keep the wine in larger containers, like magnum bottles or big jars that seal. The open headspace in the bottle will aerate the wine effectively without the use of bulky kitchen appliances.
The solution to the unpleasantness of many cheap wines is balancing the acidity. A squeeze of lemon is the quickest and easiest way to brighten flabby wine. Allow your glass to sit for a minute to make sure the lemon is well mixed in, and then wipe the rim of the glass to ensure there’s no residue. The aromas of lemon will integrate into the existing bouquet, leaving you with a more balanced end product. Lime works in a pinch, but not as well, as it contains less citric acid.
You can also add the most common acid found in processed food — citric acid. You could try a vitamin C pill. Make sure to get a brand that doesn’t have flavor additives (no Flintstones). Still, even if you grind them up really well, these things are hard to dissolve and every vitamin we tried still finished with a chalky, rosehip tang. The best solution we found in the pantry was the citric acid dust scavenged from the bottom of a bag of sour candy, like Sour Patch Kids. This powder fully dissolved into the wine, and potently boosted the acidity. There was little, if any, noticeable candy flavor. It does take quite a bit of the flavor dust to make your wine zippy, so unless you have a pack-a-day gummy worm habit, you probably won’t be able to collect enough of the stuff to correct more than a glass at a time. If you plan on drinking a lot of cheap, flabby wine, it might be worth investing in a pack of citric acid from a homebrew shop.
Chaptalization is the addition of sugar to wine to boost the potential alcohol on difficult vintages. It’s widely practiced in cooler wine regions around the world. While most bad wines you’ll purchase in American supermarkets won’t lack sugar (if anything, they’ll be too sweet), occasionally we’ll encounter a cheap wine that is thin and acidic. Granulated sugar can be hard to incorporate. Stevia works better. Adding simple syrup can help balance the flavors, but it also waters down the wine.
The best way to sweeten wine is by adding unfermented grape juice. Using the grape juice that you’ll find at the supermarket isn’t the same, though. Juice grapes, like Concord, are very different from wine grape varieties, and will dramatically alter the wine’s flavor.
Since sweeter wine will have a higher gravity than drier wine, a way to determine how much you’ve changed the sugar level is by using a hydrometer. These floating instruments can be found at homebrew supply stores. But that’s only if you’re getting super nerdy. The best measurement is your own taste. If you don’t think a wine is sweet enough, just dump more juice in.
The popular rule with temperatures is that white wine is served chilled and red wine is served cool. In truth, cheap wine doesn’t need to be sipped and contemplated. Bad wine of all colors and varieties should be served cold, very cold. Like cheap “lite” beer, flabby, unbalanced wine becomes miserable when it warms up. Serving wine a little colder is also the quick fix for wine that is “hot,” or has a noticeable alcohol burn on the palate.
Chill bad wine down to the coldest point possible before it begins to freeze. Frozen rosé, or frozé, might be a popular happy hour wine cocktail, but do not try this at home. First of all, making a slush without the machine is a demanding process that requires regular stirring and a ton of added sugar. Second, freezing a liquid concentrates the flavors, which is the last thing you want to do to your bad wine. Unless the water is re-incorporated using a good slush mixer, a bad wine slush will taste even more like the bad wine.
Hold up on those ice cubes. Watering down gross wine just means you have to drink more of it. If you want to keep your glass ice-cold, try whiskey stones. These rocks are kept in the freezer and are cherished by lovers of fine scotch for keeping their dram cold without watering it down.
Note that chilling is best for bad wine that is aggressive and unbalanced on the palate, but it doesn’t do much for a wine that smells bad. This trick also won’t work for more tannic wines (few cheap wines have much in the way of tannic structure anyway). A chalky texture served ice cold is a terrible mix that reminds us of poorly churned ice cream.
When wine is infected with a nefarious mold, it’s declared “corked.” It happens when any wine under cork enclosure becomes infected with Trichloroanisole, or TCA. In small amounts, this compound will flatten the aromas, and in larger concentrations, it creates a nauseating mildew smell. The whole ritual of testing a wine and inspecting the cork that’s done in fancy restaurants exists so that the customer can determine if the wine is sound. If there is a serious problem with the wine, it’s likely TCA. The best solution for corked wine is to return it. Any respectable retailer will take it back after taking a whiff. But if you’re not ready to get up off the couch, or maybe you’re just really thirsty, there is a solution.
A well-known corked wine hack is to use saran wrap to leach out the TCA compounds that make it taste moldy. This weird trick works because the trichloroanisole compounds that cause cork taint are chemically similar to the polythene in plastic wrap. When you swish a ball of plastic wrap around in the wine, the compounds bind together and the moldy smell can be lifted right out.
To be clear, this won’t actually fix corked wine. The aromas of the wine will be destroyed from the taint, and nothing can restore them. All the plastic wrap will do is possibly make the wine less moldy smelling. At best the wine will be drinkable, but not particularly pleasant. At least with the mildew smell gone, you can make a nice punch.
Like chilling a beverage, carbonation helps to mute some of the off flavors. It works especially well with wine that is too sweet. Why does flat soda taste so nasty? Because soda is incredibly sweet. We’ve all seen those charts showing there is enough sugar in one can to fill up 60% of it. Making it bubbly helps a hummingbird-nectar-sweet drink become refreshing and palatable.
Our first thought was to run our wine through an at-home carbonation system used to make soda and sparkling water. Be warned: manufacturers caution against doing this, and it will void warranties. But, it does work… even if the clumsy, soda-like bubbles are a far cry from the delicate mousse of Champagne.
Oddly enough, the most popular way to make wine bubbly around the world is by adding sugary soda. Drinkers throughout Europe mix Coke and red wine, or even Sprite with white. This doesn’t correct wine as much as turn it into a mixed drink. If anything, we would add a hard mineral water. The traces of sodium compounds in mineral water can add a lingering complexity.
Say you’re staying in a cabin and find a dusty old wine from the ’90s that wasn’t meant to age past a year or two. You can tell pretty easily if the wine has been around for too long if it pours very light in color and smells nutty and washed-out. There is no way to restore vitality, but there is a way to ingest it without having to taste all those cabin years.
Blend expired wine — either that dusty, old bottle or one that kicked a week ago — with a fruit-forward young wine. When carefully blended, old wine can also make the cheap, young one taste more complex. This is a bootleg version of the process used in wines with solera aging, like sherry. Pour the old wine through a mesh strainer (long-aged wine usually has a lot of sediment), then slowly blend it into the young wine until you’ve hidden as much of the flavor as you can without ruining the new bottle. It’s always good to have varying levels of cheap wine around anyway, in case of emergencies.Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email and subscribe here for our YouTube channel to get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.
Trevor Hagstrom and Maggie Rosenberg are regional food researchers who regularly wander country roads in search of the best dive. Catch their latest discoveries at tandmworks.com.
If you’re a fan of the royal family (because “fan” is the more socially acceptable way of saying obsessive internet stalker), this is your year. Netflix’s The Crown has returned for its second season, the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant with her third child, Prince George and Princess Charlotte continue to be the cutest heirs to ever walk the face of the earth, and Prince Harry has finally been wrangled from his former wild ways to marry Meghan Markle this spring. All of this royal family news has us in a tizzy, and we need a stiff drink to calm our excitement back down to inside voices. Thankfully, the royal family are drinking icons. Here are the favorite drinks of all the main figures of the new Elizabethan era, so you can properly drink along with all the upcoming royal festivities.
Much has been written about the Queen’s legendary drinking habits , with many articles claiming she drinks as many as six glasses of booze a day. Insiders have disputed this rumor, saying that she “would be pickled” if she drank that much, but we all know that the queen is a creature of habit, and probably does enjoy these drinks fairly regularly. Her all-time favorite cocktail is the Dubonnet Cocktail with a lemon twist, which is gin mixed with the sweet French fortified wine the drink is named for. Her staff always carries the two bottles and lemons wherever the queen goes in case she gets thirsty. Additionally, Queen Elizabeth II is said to drink wine with lunch, the occasional Dry Martini in the afternoon, a glass or two of Champagne with dinner, and some port wine after dinner. For someone that looks 91 years young, this monarch seems to know a thing or two about the secret to a long life .
While his wife loves her gin tipples and wine, the Duke of Edinburgh just fancies beer-and none of that fancy craft stuff. His lifelong favorite brand was Boddington, a regional brewery in Manchester. Unfortunately, the brewery ceased operations in 2005, forcing Prince Philip to drink other, still unassuming, beers. He is even said to have muttered, “Get me a beer. I don’t care what kind it is. Just get me a beer!” when he was offered fine wine by former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato while dining in Rome.
The long awaiting king-to-be enjoys a wide variety of stiff drinks. His favorite whisky is a peaty Islay single malt, Laphroaig 15-year. Prince Charles also helped produce his own whisky, Barrogill ; HRH personally selected the single malts for the blend, which was distilled by Inver House Distillers and North Highland Products. The bottle features a watercolor of Barrogill Castle that was painted by Prince Charles himself. Additionally, Prince Charles is said to enjoy plenty of wine with his wife Camilla, along with his go-to cocktail, a 50/50 Martini made with equal parts gin and dry vermouth .
Prince William seems to take after his grandfather when it comes to drink preferences, opting for straightforward beers over cocktails or rare wines; His two favorite beer brands are said to be Stella Artois and Guinness, but he occasionally also enjoys shots of Sambuca. He didn’t always have such simple tastes, though. In his youth, the Duke of Cambridge was said to have ordered (on more than one occasion) the “Treasure Chest” from Piccadilly club Mahiki, which is a $180 cocktail consisting of brandy , peach liqueur and a bottle of Champagne, served in a smoking treasure chest with tons of extra-long straws, flowers and ignited sparklers.
Nowadays, you’ll find the Duchess of Cambridge publically drinking whatever is served at the many events she attends with her husband (when she’s not pregnant, of course), from Guinness at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in London to wine at a vineyard in New Zealand-where she exclaimed she was “really enjoying being able to drink again” after the birth of Prince George. But in her pre-duchess days, according to sources, Kate enjoyed fruity cocktails like Piña Coladas and the “Crack Baby,” which was served at Prince Harry’s favorite (now-defunct) nightclub, Boujis, and consisted of vodka , raspberry liqueur, passion fruit and Champagne. Rumor has it the future queen also still enjoys her go-to whiskey, Jack Daniel’s, from time to time.
The once infamous party boy may be settling into married life soon, but we reckon he’ll still enjoy his favorite drink, Cîroc Ultra-Premium Vodka , from time to time. Hopefully his bride-to-be Meghan will curb his questionable cocktail of choice, a Red Bull Vodka , and encourage him to try her far more interesting drinks of choice.
The name on the tip of everyone’s tongue this year is Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s beautiful betrothed and an American former-actress to boot. Because Markle was famous prior to her engagement, she gave decidedly down-to-earth interviews, including one with The New Potato where she said, “God, do I love wine-a beautiful full red or a crisp white. But if it’s cocktails, I love a spicy tequila cocktail, Negroni or good scotch (neat).” Markle also named her former lifestyle website, The Tig , after Tignanello red wine. If that wasn’t enough to make her your new drinking hero, Markle also once told Delish , “French fries and vino are my vices,” going on to say that she’d “forgo a gooey, chocolate dessert for a ‘big, beautiful red’ just about any day. … In the summer, though, when I’m out with my friends, it’s rosé all day.” A future duchess after our own hearts.
The Duchess of Cornwall is said to be a big fan of wine, having once said she was “brought up as a child drinking wine like the French.” But Camilla was also rumored to have exasperatedly said, “I really need a Gin & Tonic ” after exiting a conversation with Prince William over the nature of her relationship with his father, Prince Charles, back in 1998.
Queen Elizabeth II gets her proclivity for Dubonnet from her mum. The late Queen Mother was much heavier a drinker than her husband King George VI, who didn’t imbibe much during wartime due to nationwide rations and his unfortunate love for cigarettes instead. Elizabeth would allegedly start at noon with a cocktail that was one part gin and two parts Dubonnet, garnished with a lemon or orange twist (some people actually refer to the Dubonnet Cocktail as the Queen Mother Cocktail). Then at lunch, she would drink red wine and a glass of port after the meal. A biographer wrote that if people asked for water, Elizabeth would ask, “How can you not have wine with your meal?” At around 6 p.m., the Queen Mother would enjoy a Martini , and at dinner she would have some Veuve Clicquot. Other drinking-related quotes attributed to her include: “I couldn’t get through all my engagements without a little something,” and, after being told by a host that they heard she liked gin, “I hadn’t realized I enjoyed that reputation. But as I do, perhaps you could make it a large one.”
Princess Margaret is enjoying a posthumous fan obsession, thanks to her fiery, scene-stealing portrayal in The Crown. The show never depicts Margaret without a cigarette in hand, but the princess loved scotch almost as dearly. Her favorite drinks were neat scotch with a drop of water and a Scotch & Soda , both made with The Famous Grouse and Highland Spring mineral water. Her staff instructed those within her circles to always keep bottles of both on hand, in case she stopped by for an informal visit. A staff member claimed that “if you didn’t serve Famous Grouse, she could identify exactly what was in its place.” Allegedly Princess Margaret even asked for the scotch while visiting The Macallan distillery in the 1980s. A decanter of The Famous Grouse was always present at Margaret’s apartment, and though she was “always a delight,” according to a friend , “there could be unpleasantness with staff if her glass wasn’t kept full or if the ice melted. That was one of her tiny weaknesses.” Today, the royal family continues to support the whisky brand; the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge opened The Famous Grouse Experience at the Glenturret distillery in 2014.
The late, beloved Princess of Wales wasn’t much for imbibing; she opted to skip the booze in favor of maintaining her iconic radiant skin. But when she did drink, she preferred something light, like chilled white wine, Champagne or a peachy Bellini. She is said to have ordered a Bellini on her infamous night out on the town with Freddie Mercury when she disguised herself as a man.