Top ten uses for wine (besides drinking)

July 4th, 2013

Appliance Talk

Dry July has arrived again, with many of us fond of the odd tipple hanging up the wine glasses and switching to coffee in the name of charity.

But what to do with that leftover wine in the house (assuming any survived the pre-July period)?  After all, even with a screw-cap, wine can start to oxidise and go off once it’s been opened, meaning it may not be worth drinking once July is over!

Much like our blog from this time last year regarding beer, here are ten ways you can put wine to use for something other than intoxication:

Dye fabric

Anyone who’s ever had to deal with a red wine stain should be familiar with how effectively red wine can dye cloth.  So if you’re a fan of fashion in the pink to dark red spectrum, why not use wine to dye your clothes on purpose?

Using a process not unlike tie-dying, you can dye clothes with wine by heating a pot full of the stuff until it’s simmering, then stirring your chosen garment in the brew (possibly having bound up the fabric in rubber bands to create one of those funky tie-dye patterns) until it reaches the colour you like.  Be sure to rinse the fabric well afterwards to wash out excess wine and prevent the wearer from smelling of grapes!

Just like with tie-dyed clothes, be careful with wine-dyed clothes when it comes to doing the laundry, as their colours run easily – consider hand-washing until you’re confident that they will fade no longer.

Give your skin a treat

You know how people always go on about how those antioxidants in wine are so very good for you?  You don’t have to intoxicate yourself by drinking the stuff to get these antioxidants into your body – you could just immerse yourself in wine instead.

Known as vinotherapy, this treatment operates on the understanding that wine’s phytophenols, procyanidins and resveratrols can serve as anti-aging measures for skin, with its acidity also functioning as a toner.  Since it would be prohibitively expensive to completely fill a bathtub with wine, you can just add a glass of red to your bath water as part of a skin-softening regime – this diluted solution should allow the handy nutrients to get right into your pores and work their magic.

That said, we are not scientists and thus can’t guarantee the effectiveness of vinotherapy treatment – if you’re curious though, feel free to give it a try.

Cleaning

It may sound counterintuitive to clean with wine, as anyone who’s struggled with getting a red winestain (or something worse) out of a carpet will tell you.  However, wine’s acidity and antioxidants give it certain antibacterial properties, making it a surprisingly effective disinfectant.

When you’re cleaning your kitchen benchtops, a touch of dry white wine (to avoid staining and sticky residue) mixed in with your washing water should not only clean, but disinfect your surface.  Don’t use it on granite benchtops though – acidic wine won’t be good for its surface.

Trap fruit flies

Much like rats, ants and roaches, flies and other pests are attracted to strong fruity odours, such as the fermentation agents found in wine, vinegar and similar products.

Provided you can resist the temptation yourself, leave a glass of wine out to attract fruit flies.  Stretch a sheet of plastic wrap over the top, ensuring a tight seal around the sides, and poke a few pinprick-sized holes in the top.  The scent of the wine wafting through the holes will lure the flies in, but they’ll struggle to find their way back out, leaving them with no option but to drown in alcohol.  Poor things.

Heal a bruise

Old wives tales swear that soaking a piece of bread in wine and holding it to a bruise will accelerate its healing process.  Apparently it also works to mix red wine with parsely using a mortar and pestle to create a paste to be applied to the bruise.

Does this actually work?  We don’t plan on arguing with any old wives (they tend to be pretty tough) – if you apply the same principles behind vinotherapy here, then wine should indeed provide some benefit to bruised skin.  However, it’s probably not so good for bruises if wine is taken internally, as drinking wine can thin the blood and actually spread bruises.

Cook

While the point of Dry July is to swear off intoxication (i.e. no cooking while drunk), it is still possible to use wine in cooking if you’re comfortable with it, according to the Dry July Twitter.

Brasato Al Rosmarino with Potatoes, Pancetta and Pumpkin by Bruno Conti

Wine is well-known as an excellent marinade for meats, and forms the basis for many different recipes.  If you’re abstaining from booze, the longer and more intensely you cook, the more alcohol content should be evaporated by the cooking process.  Trace amounts of alcohol may be left behind, but likely not enough to seriously affect you.

If you want to completely abstain from wine altogether during Dry July, but still like the idea of using your leftover wine for cooking, you can guarantee it against spoiling by freezing it in an ice cube tray (such as the one found in many fridges and freezers), creating handy cubes that you can drop into your next recipe, no matter how far down the track – just remember NOT to accidentally drop them into your Dry July mocktails!

Make vinegar

Vinegar is a great substance to have handy around the house, as it seems to be useful for practically anything, from cooking to cleaning, eliminating odours, killing mould and mildew, and more.

The slow but simple way of making vinegar is to take wine and let it go off by leaving it out for three to four weeks.

If you’d like to get results sooner, add a cup of pre-made vinegar to the wine – the natural, organic kind with a layer of jelly-like bacterial sediment is best.  This “mother of vinegar” should help to accelerate the chemical reactions in the wine, transforming it more rapidly into vinegar.  The same “mother” can then be saved and used again for the next batch as well.

Power a car!

Apparently His Royal Highness, Charles the Prince of Wales, converted an Aston Martin (seen below at the Prince William’s wedding) to run on biofuels rather than fossil fuels, allowing the British royals to chug about on a mixture made primarily from their own leftover wine (and since they’re known as fans of the odd drop, the royal family should have a bit to spare).

If you’re a dab hand in the garage, maybe you could try doing something similar yourself, though I imagine the motoring governing body in your state would have something to say about it, and you could run into difficulty getting your hands on the right equipment for processing the wine, not to mention sourcing sufficient quantities of the wine itself (Aston Martins aren’t too easy to come by either, for the record).

Compost

Enjoy gardening?  Wine is often described as a living, breathing thing, which ferments and changes its chemical composition as it ages, and thus can prove very handy down in the backyard.

Wine’s can be added to your backyard compost heap in order to kickstart its decomposition and fermentation, allowing your food scraps to get nice and mulchy and the worms to be very happy.

Save it for later

Got bottles of wine you won’t be drinking for Dry July?  Well, just because you’re not drinking them now doesn’t mean you won’t be drinking them EVER again!

35-bottle Vintec Wine Storage Cabinet

Use a wine storage cabinet to save those special bottles in the perfect conditions for July or longer so that they’ll still be perfect when the time comes to open them up.  If you like, you can store them for even longer, so that when you finally pop the corks (or unscrew the caps), they’ll have improved with age.