One of life’s greatest displeasures is opening a bottle of wine to drink only to have part of the bottle left over, unfinished and past its prime a few days later. With every drop that gets reluctantly poured down the drain, you wish you’d either had help in polishing off the bottle or some way of preserving it.
There’s a way, however, to let the wine not go to waste completely. Making vinegar with your spent wine, although it takes a little more effort than a swift pour down the drain, is a creative way to let your old wine have a second life.
What is vinegar?
“In my simplified terms, vinegar is an acetic acid fermentation that’s made by converting alcohol to acetic acid through lots of free oxygen and bacteria, most commonly acetobacter aceti [a specific genus of acetic acid bacteria (AAB)], which exists in the air around us all across the globe,” says Jori Jayne Emde, the founder of Lady Jayne’s Alchemy and fermentation consultant for Fish & Game in Hudson, New York.
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Where to start
Once you decide to try your hand at this simple method of fermentation, it’s time to first do some light reading. “I would recommend [enthusiasts] read and understand what vinegar is first, so they can understand what’s happening in their fermentation experiment,” says Emde. “Many people these days jump to a project without completely knowing what's actually going on, and then there’s a lack of confidence with their projects.”
There are a few ways you can turn your spent wines into vinegar, and it’s important to choose which method is best for you. “You can allow your wines to oxidize/acidify [become more acidic] spontaneously, but that can be a little haphazard,” says Johnny Drain, a renowned fermentation expert and consultant, who runs fermentation research and development for Cub in London. “And it's slower,” he adds. By “slower” he means the process can take months to be completed. “For more control and consistency, you want to enlist the help of microbial collaborators: acetic acid bacteria,” he says. This bacteria can be added in either of two forms to your spent wine: by adding unpasteurized vinegar (either unpasteurized apple cider vinegar or an unpasteurized vinegar from a previous vinegar batch, sourced perhaps from a friend or online) or a vinegar starter (i.e., a zoogleal mat, or a gelatinous blob of AAB).
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