How long can you keep wine?

Wine doesn’t have an expiry date on the label—have you ever wondered when it goes bad? How long can you keep an unopened bottle of wine before it starts to affect the taste? We decided to find out!

Wine doesn’t spoil per se, but it oxidizes, which changes the taste (although not always for the worst!)

How it tastes depends on various factors, like the producer, the species of grape, where it came from and how it’s stored.

Inexpensive wine

Many wineries in lower price brackets recommend drinking white wine within 1-2 years and red wine within 2-3 years.

Aged wine

Fine wine has a rich flavor and is highly resistant to oxidation. Wine that is suitable for aging can have many different aging periods—as short as 10 years or as long as 80 years.

With that said, your average table wine is sold when it’s meant to be drunk, so by the sounds of things, you should still drink it soon.

Then again…different people have different preferences about how long wine should be aged, so there’s no hard and fast rule about the right time to drink it. That’s what makes wine so complex and interesting!

Incidentally, once you open a bottle of wine, it loses its taste quite quickly. It’s OK for a few days, but apparently you’re supposed to drink it as soon as you open it!

Not that that’s likely to be a problem—us liquor lovers don’t stop at one glass!

Ha ha!