If You Drink Wine (Ever), You Need This $9 Amazon Find

Wine isn’t something my husband and I save for weekends or special occasions. We actually enjoy it most nights of the week—casually, though! Just a glass with dinner to toast to the day. (It’s a habit I developed from my days in Italy and really do enjoy the ritual.) This means that once we open a bottle we’d really like for it to be able to last us a couple of days, as a single bottle of wine holds about four to five glasses.

The problem, however, is that once the cork is opened, it’s hard to keep the wine tasting fresh. There are countless products on the market to combat this and I’ve pretty much tried them all. Truth be told, most don’t work. Through all my digging, though, I found one gadget that actually works as advertised—and it’s less than $10.

There are lots of wine pumps out there that claim to preserve your wine. They do this by pumping out the oxygen—what causes the wine to lose its freshness—that’s in the bottle when you re-seal it. However, I find most pumps never vacuum-seal the bottle as promised and, without an airtight seal, oxygen seeps back into the bottle.

During a recent trip to Italy, I found a wine pump that looked hefty and promising. Plus, I trust Italians when it comes to wine, so I decided to give it a try. It’s hard to see here, but you place the device on an open bottle—a stopper latches on and you pull and push the casing, which pumps out the air. It worked so well—actually maintaining a vacuum seal—that I got a bunch to bring back for my family. Now, it’s the only wine saver we use.

It keeps a bottle fresh for about five days, once opened, so we can have one glass of wine at dinner and know that the rest of the bottle will be fresh when we reach for it next.

Luckily, you don’t have to fly to Italy to get one: The same wine pump is sold on Amazon! I’ve since bought a couple more, which has been helpful when there’s more than one bottle open after a party or when we just feel like mixing things up during the week.

Have you used this? Or found another option that you love? Discuss in the comments below!

This post originally ran on Kitchn. See it there: If You Drink Wine (Ever), You Need This $9 Amazon Find