3 Budget Wine Accessories (and 1 Splurge) for the Wine Enthusiast {Thursday 3: August 9, 2018}

If you’re anything like me and the rest of America, you’re in the middle of a love affair with wine right now. Wine is having a BIG moment, and I’m all aboard that wine train. But once you get into the wine world, all those wine accessories can be expensive. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s finding a quality product for less.

In today’s Thursday 3, I’m sharing with you the three wine accessories I love that cost less than $20, plus one splurge that I think is completely worth the investment for wine enthusiasts.

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Back in 2014, when we were young, wild, and free (emphasis on free – not so young [31] and not so wild [working full-time and dutifully paying the rent on the first day of the month]), K and I went on a road trip from Washington to California. On this trip, we  took a wine tour at Robert Mondavi Winery. The tour was super educational and taught us just enough to make us not look like complete amateurs when walking into a tasting room.

One lesson we learned was to include an aerator for red wine in our wine accessories arsenal. An aerator adds air into your wine, which enables oxidation and evaporation. Oxidation and evaporation reduces the unwanted compounds in wine, such as ethanol and sulfites, and leaves the desirable compounds behind. In short, it makes the wine smell and taste better.

We bought this VinOair wine aerator and really like it. Stick it right into the bottle, pour into your glass, and watch as the gadget creates bubbles in your wine, aerating and making it more delicious.

When I open a bottle of wine, I don’t finish it the same night unless I’m sharing it. Before I bought these Rabbit wine bottle stoppers, I always shoved the cork back into the bottle. Big mistake! When you do that, you aren’t creating an airtight seal, so the flavor of your wine doesn’t get preserved.

When we returned home from our California road trip, we went on a spree buying all sorts of wine accessories. I think these bottle stoppers were one of our best purchases. They have never leaked even though we store our bottles horizontally in our wine fridge (see below), they fit every bottle we’ve ever bought, and their quality has held up over the past four years. Suffice it to say they’ve made one happy customer out of me.

Okay, I admit it. This is not an essential wine accessory. Any ol’ corkscrew can pull a cork out of a wine bottle, but how many times have you broken a cork and watched the bottom half fall woefully into the bottle? Maybe not as often as I have, but there have to be more than a handful of klutzes out there that can use a little help when it comes to uncorking a bottle.

Enter the Oster electric wine bottle opener. Just stick the neck into the bottle opener, press the switch, and the gadget does all the work for you! No more cork floating in your glass of wine.

Out of all the wine accessories we have purchased, this Whynter wine cooler is by far our best buy. We flew out of the San Jose airport with what seemed to us at the time an ungodly amount of wine. It was probably around twelve bottles. Now I would hope we’d come out of Napa with more than that if we were to visit again!

When we returned to our tiny cottage on Maui, the August heat was unbearable inside and we didn’t have air conditioning. I knew that we needed to keep our new fancy wine at a lower temperature, but we didn’t have room in our medium-sized refrigerator.

This Whynter wine cooler solved all our problems. First of all, it frees up space in our regular refrigerator.  And secondly, it keeps our bottles at the ideal temperature for storage. On our wine tour, we learned the optimal temperature to store both red and white wine is 54 degrees Fahrenheit. A regular refrigerator is set at a much lower temperature, so storing our wine in the wine fridge prevents it from aging prematurely. Out of all our wine accessories, it has been our best investment yet.

I’d love to know what wine accessories you swear by. Let me know in the comments!