If you have champagne leftover from tonight’s festivities, do yourself a favor and take it out of the fridge in the morning.
While keeping a bottle in the fridge for a few days is fine, leaving it in there for weeks or months on end can dry out the cork and ultimately lead to your wine losing its flavor and its bubbles, Bloomberg reports.
So, if you purchased six bottles for tonight’s main event and only make your way through three of them, go ahead and take them out of the fridge in the morning and wait to put them back in until a few days before you’ll need them. In the interim, make sure they’re stored on their side.
Bloomberg makes a number of great suggestions about how you should store and serve that sparkling wine.
Another good one: Take the bottle out of the fridge roughly 15 minutes before you plan on consuming it. Champagne isn’t meant to be consumed at refrigerator temperature. If it’s too cold, you’ll miss out of some of the wine’s flavor. If it’s too warm, then it loses its crispness. Giving that bottle 15 minutes to warm up before you serve it should ensure that what you’re drinking is the perfect temp.