How long does opened wine last in the fridge?

The short version: a resealed bottle of still wine in the fridge is usually at its best for three to five days, sparkling wine loses its fizz within one to three, and a fortified wine like sherry or port can hold up for a month or more. None of that is printed anywhere on the bottle. Wine carries a vintage and sometimes a best-before for the unopened bottle, but the moment air gets in, you are on your own — there is no opened-bottle date to read, only the clock itself.

Why there is nothing to fall back on

An unopened bottle of wine is sealed against oxygen almost completely, which is why a well-made red can improve for years in the dark. Pulling the cork ends that. From that moment, oxygen is dissolving into the wine and slowly turning its alcohol into acetaldehyde and then acetic acid — the same reaction, chemically, that turns wine into vinegar, just running slowly enough in a fridge that you get days rather than hours. No producer prints a countdown for that process, because it depends entirely on how much air got in and how the bottle was handled afterward, none of which they can know in advance.

What actually decides how long it lasts

How much air is sitting on top of the wine. A bottle that is a third empty has far more oxygen in contact with the wine than one poured down to the last glass, and that headspace is doing most of the damage. Decanting a nearly-empty bottle into a smaller, fuller container before it goes in the fridge genuinely slows things down, because it shrinks the air pocket.

What kind of wine it is. Sparkling wine is the shortest-lived, because it is losing its carbonation as well as oxidizing — a day or two with a proper stopper, not the fridge door alone. Light, high-acid whites and rosés hold for five to seven days. Fuller-bodied whites and most reds run three to five, since their lower acidity gives spoilage bacteria a little more room. Fortified wines — sherry, port, marsala — already have extra alcohol and, for some styles, added sugar working against oxidation, so an opened bottle can genuinely still be good after several weeks in the fridge.

Temperature, for every colour. Oxidation and bacterial spoilage both slow down in the cold, which is why the fridge helps a red as much as a white even though nobody serves red wine cold. Pull it out to warm up in the glass at serving time; keep the bottle itself cold between pours.

The stopper. A wine bottle's original cork was made for one insertion, not for going back in cleanly. A dedicated stopper, or even just pushing the cork back in firmly, keeps the remaining air pocket from moving in and out of the bottle every time the fridge door opens and closes nearby.

How to judge it yourself

As with most opened food, your own senses are the better instrument here, not a rule of thumb.

• Smell first. Fresh fruit aromas fading to something flat and dull is ordinary ageing, not spoilage. A sharp, nail-polish-remover edge, or a smell closer to vinegar, means the wine has crossed over.
• Then taste a small sip. Wine that has turned tastes noticeably sourer and thinner than it did on day one, with the fruit character gone. It will not make you unwell — it is simply no longer wine you would choose to drink, closer to a weak vinegar.
• Look at a still white or rosé. A deepening amber or brownish tint beyond the wine's normal colour is a visible sign of oxidation, often before the smell fully confirms it.
• For sparkling, the tell is simple. If it has gone flat, that decision has already been made for you, whatever the calendar says.

The thing that actually helps

Wine is an easy bottle to lose track of precisely because it does not look urgent. A carton of milk past its window announces itself; a half bottle of red pushed to the back of the door shelf just sits there, and by the time someone finds it, nobody remembers whether it was opened on Sunday or three Sundays ago. In a shared household this gets worse rather than better — the person who opens a bottle on a Friday evening is rarely the person who finds it again the following week.

The fix is the same low-tech habit that works for everything else in the fridge: note the day a bottle was opened, somewhere you will actually see it, rather than trusting memory to hold a growing list of open containers and their ages. This is the specific gap Munch's opened-item tracking is built to close — marking a bottle opened starts its own shorter countdown from that day, separate from anything printed on the label, visible to everyone in the house, so the wine someone opened for Friday dinner does not quietly become the bottle nobody claims responsibility for by the following weekend.

None of this calls for treating an open bottle like a ticking clock you have to beat. It mostly calls for knowing, at a glance, which bottle in the fridge is three days into being open and which one is three weeks — a fact that is trivial to check the day you open it, and close to impossible to reconstruct later from memory alone.