This Miracle Stain Remover is My Best $7 Secret

When you need to, say, patch a hole in the wall, you have the luxury of time on your side. You can wait until the weekend to research the best fix, and watch a few YouTube videos until you’re sure you know exactly what to do. Not so with stains. When red wine (or coffee, or blood, or tomato sauce) starts to set in, the clock is already ticking. You need to address the mess—and fast.

That stain-induced panic is one reason I’m so thankful to have found a single stain remover I can trust to be my front line against anything. No matter what I spill, or what I spill it on, I reach for Wine Away.

Now I realize I sound like an infomercial, so I want you to know I have actually never bought a bottle of Wine Away in my life. When we bought our loft, a dear friend brought us a housewarming gift—a big bottle of red wine, and a teeny 2-ounce bottle of Wine Away. “In case things get too rowdy,” she said with a wink.

Since that day two years ago, I have dipped into that teeny spray bottle what feels like a hundred times, and I still have half the bottle left over.

As long as you’re fast, Wine Away seems to dissolve any stain you spray it on. When a friend spilled red wine on a pillow, I grabbed a towel and the spray and began to blot it out like magic. It masterfully removed the giant blood stain I got on our brand new sofa just a week after having it delivered (my husband still doesn’t know—hi honey!). And when Apartment Therapy tested it against two other methods for removing coffee stains, Wine Away won out as the clear winner.

(And I’m not the only one evangelical about it: A comment on that coffee stain test lab post enthusiastically reads: “I LOVE LOVE LOVE THE WINE AWAY! I USE IT FOR EVERYTHING AND COFFEE IS ONE OF THEM. When in doubt use WINE AWAY—it’s the BEST!!”)

I’ve had a few stains that Wine Away couldn’t completely vanish right away—most recently a mystery bubblegum pink stain on the front of my white jeans. Wine Away faded it, but it was still very much there after blotting. I threw it in the wash a few days later, though, and the now-faded stain was gone completely.

All that is to say, Wine Away deserves a spot in your housekeeping kit. It’s a dang miracle worker. The $7 is well worth the confidence of knowing exactly what to reach for whenever shit happens.

Plus, once you get it home and love it, you’ll now have the greatest go-to housewarming gift in history: red wine and Wine Away. Pass it on!