By pumping the handle up and down (stop thinking what you’re thinking, you dirty bird), the pump sucks the air out of the bottle through a small slit in the top of the stopper. This sucks the air out of the bottle, creating a vacuum seal and preserving your wine for up to a week. Best of all, you can reuse the stoppers and the pump innumerable times.

Solution no. 2 is to gas your bottle. A can of inert gas can be purchased for under $10 (Private Preserve is WoW’s pick, simply because it’s so easy to find). Like a tall, skinny can of WD-40, you use a plastic straw to spray the gas into the bottle of unfinished wine. The gas is heavier than the oxygen, so it creates a blanket over the wine, separating it from the oxygen (most of which is displaced out of the bottle by the gas sprayed in). Quickly cork the bottle up using the cork you didn’t throw away and PRESTO! You’ve just saved your wine!

So, which option is better? In the long run sucking is certainly cheaper, since a can of inert gas lasts only so long (about 120 uses). But, a lot of experts attest that gassing a bottle is a more effective preserver. I think this is largely due to poor sucking (or sucky pumping). Using a vacuum pump takes some elbow grease, requiring you to pump air out of the bottle until moving the pump becomes difficult. That’s when you know you’ve achieved vacuum-seal status (moistening the stopper before insertion also helps create an air-tight seal… stop thinking like that). I’ve done tests with two of the same wine – one saved with Private Preserve and one using Vacu Vin and pumping the hell out of it – and I find their effectiveness to be about even.

Thus, I recommend having both on hand. Rely mostly on the Vacu Vin, and keep the gas on hand for the nights when you feel particularly lazy. They will come up, I assure you.

What if you’re reading this while staring down the barrel of a half open cabernet, and neither option in the cupboard? There is one other choice, albeit only for the desperate and/or MacGyver in all of us. Cork the unfinished bottle with the original cork and stick it in the refrigerator. Oxidization is a chemical process and, as chemical reactions are known to do, it slows down in colder temperatures. Putting the wine in the refrigerator will achieve this, even if you’ve trapped oxygen in with the wine. It ain’t pretty or perfect, but it sure is better than nothing. Just make sure that you let red wine come back up near room temperature before drinking it.

There you have it: A couple good ways of saving your wine. One is labor intensive; the other is a bit more expensive. And, you have a stop-gap measure until you pick up one of the two options wherever fine wines (and paraphernalia) are sold. Now you just need to put down the glass so you can try one of them. Really… step away from the glass….

A friend recently told me about a rather dull Friday night with his significant other. “We had half a bottle of wine left when we both fell asleep on the couch. Do we suck?” he asked.

“Yes,” I responded, “or gas. The choice is yours.”

I was of course referring to what they should do to preserve the left over wine. I’m narrowly focused like that.

How to save an open bottle of wine is a common question, and an important one. Lackluster performance from a day-or-three-old bottle of wine needn’t be inevitable. If you thought Sade was singing about merlot when she crooned, “It’s never as good as the first time,” take heed and take note. There is something you can do.

For those of you perfectly baffled right now, allow me to explain. Some people, when they open a bottle of wine, don’t always finish it. Strange but true, they leave some of the wine and drink it at a later date. If this concept seems more incomprehensible than a David Lynch movie, that’s a good indication that you should give it a try.

As I mentioned, you really have two preservation options – gassing and sucking – and both accomplish the same goal. They take oxygen away from your precious vino.

Oxygen is wine’s best friend and worst enemy. Not unlike some people I know, a little exposure to O2 is a wonderful, broadening experience, while too much contact can just spoil things.

When you uncork a wine, pouring it into a glass lets it breathe, or get exposed to oxygen to let out the aromas and flavors. That’s good. However, extended exposure to the air oxidizes the wine, stripping it of flavor and smell, leaving you with something you would expect to unscrew and pour from a large jug.

Just sticking the cork back in a half-full bottle of wine is analogous to closing the barn doors after the horses have run out (or, more precisely, closing the chicken coop doors after the fox has run in). You’re trapping oxygen in the bottle along with your wine. Like laundry, the wine and oxygen must be separated.

Solution no. 1 is to suck. For $10-14, you can buy a small, T-shaped hand pump and two rubber wine bottle stoppers (Vacu Vin is a widely available and WoW-recommended brand). First, insert the rubber stopper in the top of the bottleneck, as you would a cork. Next, place the bottom of the pump over the topper.