Over my years of drinking wine, I’ve learnt that there are a few products that truly add to the enjoyment of wine. Now that I have them in my life, I can’t imagine living without them! They are things that you could easily get your hands on, but things that I would highly recommend having on hand if you want to start getting into wine. I know they have made my life so much easier, and the wine more enjoyable.

So here it is, my top 3 products that you should consider having on hand to make wine that much more enjoyable!

Wine Aerator

This is probably one of the first wine related tools I bought, and we actually have two at my house (I guess just in case we need them). You can get wine aerators in many forms, and there is a lot of variety to choose from. The simplest form of aerating is simply pouring the wine into your wine glass, or swirling it around before sipping. If you want a bit more, you can get this from a glass decanter of some description. The process of pouring the wine into another vessel aerates the wine. But if you don’t want to pour your wine into a decanter every time, there are so many other options out there that make wine aerating so important.

We usually only decant our fancier, older wine, because decanting feels like a flashy process. But the benefits of aerating wine that is young, such as an under $20 bottle, are so good that it is worth having something on hand to aerate these too. The aeration really brings out the good flavours in young wines and makes them all the more enjoyable, without having to spend too much!

The process of aerating makes the wine is quite scientific including oxidation and evaporation. Basically what all of that means is that aerating the wine makes the good flavours in the wine stand out, and removes the undesirable ones. It reduces the effects of things like sulfite on the wine so that you don’t get strong smells like rotten eggs (yep, it can happen). So it is a good thing to do to really bring the flavours to light. This is why it’s good to not only aerate old wine but also young wine which might have a strong alcoholic smell before you aerate it.

What to look for

The aerator we use is one you can stick into the top of the wine bottle and pour the wine out as usual. The contraption will aerate the wine as it pours without you having to do a thing! I have seen a few hand-held aerators that you pour the wine into which work the same way, but this one I find the easiest to use as you can simply plug and play! We use it for pretty much every bottle we open, so it truly gets a work out but is yet to die – and it’s been a good few years!

The one we have is the VinOair Wine Aerator. Now it isn’t the cheapest, retailing at around $30-$40, but it is worth paying for. It has lasted us so well, is so simple to use, and has worked so much magic on every bottle we’ve used it on. Definitely worth getting because I really can’t live without it!

Pump and stoppers

I have chatted to a guy from work who is just getting into wine, and he opened a bottle of wine on the weekend that he was hoping to enjoy the following weekend. The problem was he had just left the bottle and not pumped the air out. I let him know the sad news that his wine was probably off already, and wouldn’t make it to the next weekend.

If you want to leave a bottle of wine for a couple of nights, even up to a week, you need to get a pump and stopper. It pulls the air out of the wine bottle to stop the oxidation process, and ensures that your wine stays as fresh as when you first opened it. If you don’t do this, the air will turn the wine into vinegar over time, and let me tell you, no one wants to drink vinegar! There is nothing more depressing than having a glass or two of a nice bottle of wine, and coming back to it only to find it is completely ruined.

Although you can get wine stoppers on their own, they don’t remove the air from the bottle, and so the wine is still affected. By removing the air, you can make sure that your wine will stay fresh and ready to drink. It means you can come back to it even in a weeks time and still have a great drop!

What to look for

You can get so many of these stopper sets, you won’t have any trouble finding them. Most kitchen stores will stock them, and you can also get them online. They’ll set you back anywhere between $5-$40 depending on the style and the amount of stoppers you get with it.

Personally I went for one around the $20 mark because it came with 3 or 4 stoppers and a silver pump. It isn’t anything special to look at but it has saved so many bottles of wine for me and truly lasted the years. You need something that will do the job right.

You can also get pumps that inject argon gas into the bottle to keep it super fresh. These are a lot more expensive, and honestly in my experience the pump is fine. I never leave a bottle of wine open long enough to need this. Maybe one day I’ll have nice enough wines to justify it!

Champagne stopper

Until I got one of these, I would use the old wives tale trick of putting a spoon in the top of my sparkling to keep it fresh. FYI, this is something that doesn’t actually work, especially if you need it to last over a few days! I’ve heard a few other methods for keeping sparkling from going flat, but nothing works as well as a proper champagne stopper!

If you’re not using a champagne stopper, I find the bubbles in the sparkling can go flat quite quickly. This made me feel like I could only open up a bottle of sparkling if I knew I could polish it off with friends within an evening. If I wanted just a glass it was simply not an option because the entire bottle would go flat! What was I to do?

Well, I knew the answer. It wasn’t putting glad wrap over the bottle, a spoon in the top, or even stuffing the cork back in (very hard to do…I’ve tried). I needed to get a champagne stopper! I didn’t actually end up doing this until we were in the Champagne region in France, at which point I bought one at a tourist shop. Something about having a champagne stopper from Champagne makes it feel that much fancier. Now I have one I simply can’t live without it, because its meant I can enjoy my sparkling for days after opening with all the bubbles in tact!

What to look for

The best champagne stoppers have a rubber inner and two metal hinged sides that slip around the rim of the bottle.  Without it, the intense pressure inside the bottle from the carbonation of the bubbles will force any other stopper out! This is why using a cork doesn’t work because it gets forced out, and your bubbly goes flat.

You can usually find these at home and kitchen stores, or I’ve found a few at wineries which can be a nice reminder of a visit. You can sometimes find them at bottle shops, but it is a bit of a specialist thing.

These Champagne stoppers will set you back only around $10-$20 and are totally worth the spend. You’ll get so much value back in the sparkling you’ve saved from going flat, especially if you are a Champagne drinker!

If you love sparkling, like me, make sure you invest in one of these to be able to enjoy your sparkling for days after popping the cork!

Final verdict

So there you have it – my top 3 tools of the wine trade. Hopefully this helps you a bit with how to care for your wine and really get the most out of it. None of these cost a lot of money, but they are so valuable to the wine drinking experience.

Are there any tools that I’ve missed? I’d love to hear from you!