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used in Europe are grafted, while it was V. labrusca that was more often used for making wine. V. labrusca, the main example of which is the Concord grape, makes a wine that gives off an almost rank aroma—or, as Jancis Robinson puts it in her Vines, Grapes and Wines, “oozing the musky smell of a wet and rather cheap fur coat which wine tasters have agreed to call ‘foxy’ in their tasting notes.” Attempts have been made to cross it with other grapes, but in almost every case (Seyval Blanc is one exception), the foxy odor of V. labrusca dominated in the resulting wine. Nevertheless, at least it survived under American conditions and made wine production possible, although it must be said that, throughout the nineteenth century, reported reactions of those who had tasted French or German wine were that American-made wine was bad, even verging on the undrinkable. However, with American victory in the Mexican-American War of 1848–49, the Southwest and California were annexed by the United States—and California, where vines for winemaking were first planted by the Spanish Franciscan missionary Father Junipero Serra in 1769, brought V. vinifera into the Union. Subsequently, when discussing American wines, some commentators made an exception for wine from California. In defense of the major V. labrusca grape, the Concord, it is profitably used for grape juice and grape jelly on a commercial scale, and there has evolved a sweet wine that many enjoy.

What can you do with leftover wine?

BOTH AT HOME and in restaurants, it is often only two people who share a bottle of wine. Now that so much wine has such high levels of alcohol (over 14 percent alcohol is very common for reds), two people sharing a standard bottle (750 ml in volume) could feel unpleasantly inebriated, as well as feeling guilty at exceeding the daily alcohol consumption recommended by doctors. An up-market British supermarket chain has launched a range of 500 ml bottles so that their customers (the middle-class ones about whose drinking habits the British government is becoming concerned) are neither tempted to overindulge nor annoyed by the waste when they don’t finish the bottle.

But if one does start with a standard 750 ml bottle and has wine left over, what should one do with it? The problem is that if you leave, say, 250 ml of wine in a 750 ml bottle, even if recorked or with the screw cap put back on, the oxygen in the air above the wine will still attack the alcohol quite rapidly and form acetic acid (the main constituent of vinegar after water) and ethyl acetate. The wine will not be terribly nice to drink.

The classic answer is to use the leftover wine for making a sauce in cooking the next day. A red wine sauce for two boneless steaks might be made as follows. Put olive oil in the frying pan, cook chopped shallots in it till yellow, pour out the contents of the pan into a bowl through a metal strainer, put aside the strainer with the filtered-off shallot, and return the olive oil in the bowl to the pan. Now put in the steaks, which you have already seasoned on both sides with salt and pepper. Fry for five minutes on either side (for a one-inch steak). While you are doing this, boil the 250 ml of leftover red wine in a small pot until the alcohol has boiled off (as judged by passing a flame over the pot)—the particularly nasty ethyl acetate has a lower boiling point than alcohol and will have boiled off as well. Put the cooked steaks on plates preheated in a 200°F oven and gently pour away the olive oil. Add the still-hot wine to the pan and also the shallot from the strainer. Resume heating the pan and scrape off any meat residues from the pan with a wooden spoon. Reduce the volume and add butter according to taste. Take the plates with the steaks out of the oven and divide the red wine/shallot/butter sauce over them. Serve with vegetables and a freshly opened bottle of red wine.

But if the wine one has not consumed is really good, it would be a terrible waste not to keep it drinkable for the next day. The chemistry is simple in principle: it will