Competition in the hotel industry is stiff and customer expectations are high. For the most part, hoteliers try hard to provide the best service possible to their guests, including great tasting meals and fresh wines by the glass.

But most hotels are playing Russian roulette with their customers’ satisfaction every time they pour a glass of wine.

With so many wine preservation options available these days, this really should no longer be a concern. There are lots of products now to address this age-old challenge, including industrial equipment like Enomatic, fancy gadgets like Coravin, and wine saving gas like Winesave.

The majority of hotels, restaurants, and pubs do know to put their bottles of leftover wine in the fridge at the end of the night. The lower temperature does help to reduce the rate of oxidation – a chemical reaction where the oxygen in the wine makes it deteriorate.

But what we’ve learned more recently is that oxygen absorption actually increases at lower temperatures. So while the wine is in the fridge, more oxygen is actually being absorbed into the wine. When the bottles are taken out the next day, oxidation accelerates and deteriorates the wine even more quickly during the day.

The new best practice in the industry is fortunately simple and affordable – simply apply some food-grade argon gas into the leftover bottles at the end of the day.

Argon is a completely harmless and relatively heavy gas that forms a protective layer over the wine preventing oxygen from being absorbed into the wine.

Some products use a number of other gases like nitrogen and/or carbon dioxide, but only argon is completely inert (so it won’t react with the wine) and heavier than air (so it sinks to form a layer vs needing to replace all the air in the bottle). And stop using those “vacuum” pumps already!

We’re all doing our best to take care of our guests.  Let’s take a second to take care of our wines.