WINE WITH DINNER – Leftover Red Wine

Last month I was talking about buying bag-in-a-box wine for cooking as a way to keep the number of opened bottles of wine down in your refrigerator. But someone pointed out that, like dandelions, miscellaneous bottles of opened wines still seem to constantly pop up from time to time. Leftover white wines don’t present much of a problem, because there are many times when you just want a small glass of cold white wine. Not so with leftover red wine.


Sure you can use it if you’re cooking something that calls for red wine. But another solution that I use, especially when more than one opened bottle of red wine ends up in my refrigerator, is to use the leftovers to make wine-soaked Kalamata olives. If you love black olives, you should try this trick. Next time you’re at the deli counter at your local store, buy a small plastic container of Kalamata (or your favorite kind of) imported black olives (make sure they are not "oil-cured") – but not the pitted kind. Domestic “jumbo” black olives have not worked as well for me.


When you get home, dump the olives in a strainer and wash the salt off of them in the sink (you may want to omit this step, but you still need to strain the olives). Place the strained olives back into the plastic container and cover the olives in the container with leftover red wine from the refrigerator. Put a sticker on the container top with the current date on it, firmly reattach the top and put it in the back of your refrigerator. It can stay there for weeks or even months and the olives just get better and better! – Jay Roelof – www.suburbanwines.com