The Absolute Easiest Way To Make Your Cheap Wine Taste Better

It's Friday night. You've had a grueling week at work, and all you want to do is enjoy a glass of wine with your feet up while binge-watching your fave series. Then you realize you forgot to pick up a bottle of the good stuff on your way home, and all your pantry has to offer is a cheap vino that you grabbed hastily from the grocery store months back, and it turns out to be not so great. What do you do? Give up on your tantalizing chilled evening and just go to bed? Or is there maybe a way to salvage that subpar bottle and make it taste a tad better, so you can have the Friday night you've been craving (and that you deserve)? 

We're here to rescue the situation! Because yes, there is something that you can do. A few things actually, but one thing in particular can turn your bad wine into something quite palatable — and it's super easy: chilling that bottle hard like you'll soon be chilling hard on the couch. Bad wine (and we say "bad" instead of cheap here, because price doesn't always equal quality or enjoyment of a wine) tends to let rip with those unstructured, unbalanced flavors from the first sip. But you'll already know what you're in for from the aromas that assault your nose when the bottle is first opened. 

After all, around 80% of taste is actually smell. So if a wine smells bad, it will typically also taste bad. But cooling your wine significantly can remedy this. Regulated cooling of wine helps to open up the beautiful aromas and flavors, but the converse happens when you cool wine too much: it inhibits them. Similarly, letting the wine breathe invites oxygen into the wine which also opens up the flavors — something you'd normally do with a decent bottle before climbing in. But when you have a bad wine to work with, you want to do the opposite.

Research shows that foods at temperatures ranging between 60 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit send stronger signals from our noses and taste buds to our brains, where we really experience aromas and flavors. So, we would enjoy a wine that is slightly chilled or at room temperature more intensely. Warmer temperatures — and more oxygen (brought into wine through letting it breathe) — encourage the levels of flavor in wine to reveal themselves. Oxygen tends to mobilize the aromatic compounds in a wine, making them more noticeable. It also helps to make tannins less astringent. 

So, with a less-than-delightful bottle, you'd rather all of that stay hidden so you are still able to drink the wine with reasonable enjoyment. When chilling white wines, the levels of alcohol and sweetness are turned down so the bright acidity shines, while in red wines, the bitterness and astringency that the tannins give the wine are dulled. So, logic tells us that the lower the temperature, the more of a dampening effect the cold has on the cheap wine's flavors and aromas. This is why tart, acidic wines are best served chilled.

Be careful not to let the wine reach freezing point, though, because when the water in the wine freezes, the actual flavors in the wine become more concentrated and pronounced. Some other hacks to improve a bad cheapie wine are to add a few drops of flavor-boosting lemon juice or a pinch of salt to your wine glass, or add some unfermented grape juice to bring a touch of distracting sweetness. You could also turn red wine into a refreshing Sangria by mixing it with apples and oranges, orange juice, sweetener, and another liquor like rum or brandy.